


The Midnight Runner by scarredsodeep

by scarredsodeep



Category: AFI
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death, College, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-13
Updated: 2009-08-13
Packaged: 2018-03-05 00:04:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 14
Words: 39,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3097535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a tragedy tears his family apart, Jade searches for a way to put his life back together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 3 Days After

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys. Thanks for being patient with me... Thanks for reading! Your suggestions and comments are always appreciated. Also, it's a well-known fact that my summaries are trash; if at any point in this story, you feel that you can offer me a better summary, I would be more than happy to accept it! So... get to it! And enjoy the ride.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone!
> 
> I've been debating whether or not to post this for weeks; I wasn't sure whether or not I could finish it. But I figure that you'll probably enjoy it, at least a little bit, and if I falter, I know you'll kick my ass into finishing it. And we all need that sometimes.
> 
> I don't own the people characters in this story are based on; all of what you're about to read is fiction.

_The funeral. I wish you’d been there. It was awful. I spent the whole time thinking of mood-lightening hell-damning jokes to whisper to you—to make you laugh. To make you smile. Inappropriate comments: about the priest’s hobbies, Nana’s dementia, women with huge breasts, death and god. You know—the kind only you would appreciate._

_I wish you’d been there, snickering during solemn moments, insulting our cousins’ children when their backs were turned, fending off alcoholic uncles and doddering aunts with skin diseases and submitting hair metal requests to the string quartet. The thing you always said about funerals was that there was no reason they had to be so_ funerary _. No reason everyone shouldn’t have a good time. An open bar—that’s what you would have suggested. An open bar, a DJ, and a ludicrous contest—food eating or wet t-shirt. Charades—Twister—margaritas. Granddad’s funeral, I remember you said to me that there should have been more dancing. I remember you making me promise that, at your funeral, we’d do the Chicken Dance at least once. For mine, we decided, the Macarena._

_I wish you’d been there, little brother._

_And I wish you were here, too._

_That’s all for now. This is just too hard. You’d know what to say. You always did. But me… well, I’m same as ever. Without two words to rub together. (Here’s where you’d snicker. Here’s where you’d make a lewd joke about other things I might rub together, instead of words.)_

_I’m lost without you._

_— Jade_

 

 

3 DAYS AFTER

Adam just flat didn’t know what to say. He sat on the couch in the Pugets’ living room, drumming his fingers on his knee, studying the brocade pattern of the fabric.

He’d thought the funeral had been bad, that it had maxed out his capacity for awkwardness and discomfort, that he had been stretched past his emotional limits, and wouldn’t ever feel anything like it again.

He wouldn’t go so far as to say that sitting in silence in this living room was worse than losing his friend, but it was still less fun that he imagined being dumped into a lake wearing cinderblock shoes might be.

For one thing, the Puget living room was strictly for entertaining. This meant that entrants to the room were expected to be wearing uncomfortable shoes, on their best behavior, and pretending to find Ellie’s second husband’s weak jokes as delightful as his weak coffee. Or, in a nutshell, that the boys and their friends, who were not mind-numbingly dull, did not constitute as guests, and were expressly forbidden from sitting on the very couches they sat on now.

Adam shifted his weight, plastic couch cover crackling beneath him, and glanced across the room at Dave. Dave was unceremoniously slumped in a loveseat, worrying at the fraying hem of his suit jacket and not meeting anyone’s eyes. Jade sat at the other end of Adam’s couch, saying nothing, and was the last thing on earth either of his friends wanted to look at.

The voice of Sam, the stepfather, carried into the living room from the kitchen. “Can I get you a coffee, boys? Something to eat?”

Sam was all right, Adam supposed. There was nothing particularly odious or oleaginous about him. He was a clean-cut, All-American poster boy for suburban bliss. Hand him a catcher’s mitt and a reluctant son or a push lawnmower, and he looked like a Northface advert. It was in essence Sam’s likability that made him so dislikable to Jade and his friends. That said, this was an entirely new experience for Adam. Sitting in The Living Room, an event that deserved capitalization, and being offered refreshments by Sam—as if he were a proper guest, and not a regular for the last six years, as unremarkable as a chipped coffee mug, or the doormat: it was all too strange. Unpalatable. It was as if loss had thrown the entire world off its axis and changed all the rules; Adam didn’t know how to play anymore.

“Boys?” Sam prompted, this time craning his head over the saloon doors into the kitchen and arching a blond eyebrow. “Can I get you anything?”

Sluggishly, Jade raised his head and stared at his stepfather. Davey straightened in his seat, but said nothing. The burden of niceties fell, predictably, to Adam. “We’re… all right, Sam. Thank you.”

It was a lie, of course. They weren’t all right. Nothing was.

“Suit yourselves, then,” Sam said, shrugging, pulling his head back into the kitchen. Silence fell again, even more uncomfortable than it had been before. Adam didn’t understand how he could behave so… _normally_. The wake had ended not an hour ago. Not an hour ago, there had been crying over his stepson’s casket, relatives and hors d’oeuvres no one could taste and the stinging blow of every memory. In a way, he welcomed the obscurity of sitting on this shrink-wrapped couch, the strangeness of the silence, Sam’s perverse offering of coffee. It was a scar—raw and red and angry, impossible to ignore. It was like god had taken a Magic Marker—or maybe a machete—and scrawled it across the moment, the scene: _he’s gone. Smith is gone. Smith is gone, and he’s not coming back_. For Sam to smile, and shrug, and ask them casually if they wanted coffee—ignoring the indomitable fact of it, carrying on like it was any other day—it made Adam’s skin crawl.

The feeling was peculiar—that nothing should ever be normal again. That their grief should alter the shape of reality forever, and that the sun should rise and Sam should smile like it was an ordinary day was like losing him all over again.

 

 

 _I just want everything to be normal again_ , thought Dave desperately, taking much longer to wash his hands than he usually did. Hell, he hadn’t even needed to go to the bathroom, not really. Anything to get out of that living room. The last time they’d been allowed in the living room had been Jade’s graduation party—more than a year ago, now. The silence was unbearable.

The absence of Smith was a huge, gaping wound. Smith and Dave had been friends since middle school—it wasn’t something he was going to just forget. He could feel the hole inside him, a void that made him feel like he’d been sucker-punched every time he remembered the unspeakable loss. His eyes stung just thinking about it.

And that was it exactly. He didn’t _want_ to think about it. He didn’t _want_ to allow it to sink it. He didn’t _want_ to get used to it. He wanted it to go away. And sure—pretending it hadn’t happened wasn’t going to change anything. But neither was sitting in that mausoleum of a living room in headsplitting silence, letting grief crash into them like the sea against rocks, turning them all into sand.

Dave scowled at his own reflection. If he dried his hands any more thoroughly, he’d be sloughing off skin. It was time. He’d have to go back out there sooner or later. No time like the present.

He took a deep breath, steeling himself, and padded back into the living room, feeling ridiculous in socked feet. Smith would have loved how funny he looked in the suit jacket, borrowed from his father and oversized, and the too-snug dress pants left over from a middle school band concert. Together, they were a dream team of outdated, ill-fitted fashion; Smith never would have let him live it down.

Adam and Jade were still sitting in the worst kind of silence, Adam’s eyes on the couch and Jade’s fixed straight ahead, unseeing. Exactly how he’d left them. Dave doubted he’d missed any rousing conversation.

Feeling callous, if not quite brave, Dave cleared his throat loudly. Adam started, whipping his head up to look; Jade didn’t react. This was ridiculous, Dave decided. He’d had enough moping and mourning to last a lifetime. Enough was enough. “What is this, a monastery?” he asked scathingly, surprising even himself with the ferocity inherent to his tone. “Gee, I hope you guys didn’t take the vow of silence without me.”

“Dave,” Adam said, something almost stern in his voice. Unspoken words: be sensitive. Jade’s in pain. Dave, however, had been bored by Adam’s unrequited since freshman year. He pressed on, undaunted.

“Get up, you slugs. If we’re going to sit in uncomfortable silence, can we at least choose a less uncomfortable venue?” Adam hit Dave with a piercing glare, but for the first time in hours, Jade reacted to something.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, eyes still dull, voice oddly blank.  
Dave was disproportionately grateful for Jade’s three syllable contribution. It wiped the glare clear off Adam’s face, for one thing. Dave bounced on the balls of his feet, anxious to go, to put some distance between himself and the service, to _move_. “Where to?” he prompted.

Adam bit his lip, thinking, and Dave had known him long enough to guess what. Deciding to go was one thing—but finding a place that wouldn’t bury them in memories was going to be a challenge.

To both Dave and Adam’s surprise, it was Jade that spoke; and the last thing anyone would have guessed is what he said.

“Feel like bowling?”

 

 

“I haven’t done this shit since I was like twelve,” Dave said somewhat disgustedly, surveying the red and blue leather clown shoes his feet were crammed into.

Adam elbowed him in the side, glowering. The day had put everyone in their worst spirits, but Jade felt himself smile, watching his best friends shove each other, trying to look menacing.

Unlike Dave, Jade remembered very clearly the last time he’d gone bowling. Sam had chosen a clear, blue-skied Saturday and decided that some familial bonding was in order. Jade had been fifteen; Smith thirteen. Alisha, their half-sister, was seven; Gibson, the baby, only four. Back when Sam was still just a boyfriend, there had been no bonding nonsense, no trips to the toy store, no thinly disguised bribes to win their attention. He had never tried as hard to win over Ellie’s sons as the other boyfriends had seemed to; he’d let his natural kindness and charm thaw them slowly, over time.

Well, if that had been the plan, it hadn’t lasted. Somehow natural charm counts for a lot less when your mother’s boyfriend moves into the house, marries her, and starts making new children, supplanting you and your bastard brother. By the time he hit fifteen, Jade was convinced that he and Smith weren’t positioned on the edges of family photos because of their height, but so that they’d be easier to crop out later on, when Ellie and Sam wanted to pretend they’d been living happily ever after all along. Fifteen isn’t a great age for anyone.

Pair that with being forced on a family bowling excursion, and Jade wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine. No—something black and terrible had risen in Jade that night, worse than the standard fare of bitter standoffishness. It was jealousy, so strong it tasted like hatred. He’d watched Sam coach his smiling natural children on bowling technique, seen the soft colored lights of the alley catch the warmth in his mother’s eyes as she looked on. And when Alisha bowled her first strike, Ellie and Sam had both cheered with real feeling; Sam spun his daughter around in the air and beamed, a real family, a real father. Everything Jade felt he didn’t have.

He had hated how happy they looked. He’d hated that they were able to feel so happy when he felt so distant, so separate, so miserable; he’d wanted to spoil for them that happiness, wanted to rub the grins off their faces.

“This is retarded,” Jade remembered saying. “I want to go home.”

Sam had looked up from where he was helping Gibson roll a ball, frowning. “Ellie?” he asked.

His mother’s face was soft. Jade was her firstborn, yes, but he was also the oldest and most difficult of her children, the worst-tempered, the most like his father. Most of that stemmed from the fact that he was fifteen, so she tried to be patient. She’d made it through four toddlers, but teenager was still new territory to her. “Can’t you just enjoy yourself?” she’d asked, voice strained. It was crystal clear to Jade in that moment that she preferred her _new children_ , as he sometimes thought of them; they were small and round-faced and fun, whereas he was too old to be cute, gangly and pale, sullen and morose.

“No, I can’t, because this is fucking retarded,” he’d snapped.

“Jade Errol,” his mother warned, frowning. “Your brother and sister are _right here_. You will watch your mouth. At least try to have a good time. Look—Smith’s having fun, aren’t you, sweetie?”

Smith was torn. For one thing, his older brother thought it was dumb, and he was still young enough to value Jade’s opinion; but on the other hand, he _liked_ bowling, _liked_ Sam, and, as long as none of the cool kids from his year were looking on, didn’t mind hanging out with his family. Besides, if Jade didn’t ruin everything, Sam had said they could get ice cream and rent a movie and all watch it together.

“I—well—yeah,” Smith had sputtered. “I like bowling.”

For reasons unclear to him now, without hesitation, Jade had cocked back his fist and punched his brother in the face—ruining everything. If he closed his eyes now, he could watch Smith fall back again and again, silent slow-motion, bright red petals blooming out of his nose, crooked; he could see the dark soundless O of his mother’s scream.

Staring across the dingy lanes in the here and now, flanked by his bewildered friends, Jade felt his lips twist into a smile, though not a happy one. Instead of the ice cream Sam had promised, they’d ended the night in the emergency room, nose broken. Smith hadn’t spoken to Jade for a week after that, and he’d been grounded twice as long. It wasn’t that it was a happy memory—no one enjoys reliving their ugly moments—but Jade felt it was an important one. Important because he’d never have a chance like it again—never have an opportunity to be a dick, jealous and competitive and teenage and mean, to his brother. From now on, he’d never be able to take a single memory of his brother for granted again, let alone the kid himself. It was a luxury, he could see now, to have been angry with Smith. A luxury to have hated him for a moment or two. A luxury he’d never have again.

Jade was startled back to reality by the unexpected weight of Adam’s hand on his shoulder. He realized how damp his eyes felt, how twisted his broken smile.

“Do you want to stay?” Adam asked quietly. Jade knew his friend was trying to take care of him, but he resented it. He didn’t want to be taken care of. He wanted his wounds to fucking bleed. He wanted to forget, so that the pain would be fresh when he remembered. He wanted to burn it into his skin, carve it into every moment of every day of the rest of his life; he wanted it to hurt, forever. He couldn’t bear the thought of it ever being anything but agony. He couldn’t bear the thought of ever getting used to it. He never wanted it to get better.

“On second thought, maybe we should look into that vow of silence thing,” Jade said quietly.

 

 

End Notes:

Let me know what you think, dears. Really--it's important to me.

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	2. 10 Days After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Round two! And don't worry, dears, the next chapter is not only longer by far, but it's also hilarious. You'll love it.
> 
> I think this one's important, too.
> 
> I don't own them; this, obviously, never happened (what with Smith being alive and walking around and all).
> 
> I want to thank you all for the wonderful feedback I got with the last chapter! Really, it's amazing to be writing for you again, and you've absolutely floored me (as usual) with how much you enjoy it, too. So thank you for that; hope you like this bit as much as the last one!

  
_I hate you so much right now. I want to bring you back to life just so I can yell at you about it. Like: how dare you be so selfish. How dare you just_ die _like that. You fucking cocksucker, how dare you leave me._

_— Jade_

 

 

10 DAYS AFTER

Gibson and Alisha stopped arguing and fell silent. Jade looked up from the badly burnt lasagna he was trying to force down. He hadn’t had much of an appetite lately. For the first time since the funeral, his mother had left her bedroom. Her cheeks weren’t even puffy anymore; her eyes, not even red. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, she’d not only gotten dressed, but she’d showered and combed her hair first. The transformation was shocking. She looked as if she’d aged ten years in the last ten days. Her face was plain, without make-up, and her brown hair was still wet, hanging straight down her back. Her eyes were flat, her cheeks looked hollow. Jade wondered if she’d been eating. She didn’t look it.

Sam, at the head of the table, stood up so abruptly that his chair almost toppled back. “Ellie,” he breathed. Her eyes made their way to his. “You’re just in time for dinner,” Sam added, voice strained. It was taking a lot of effort not to show his shock, Jade could tell. Well—he wasn’t going to pretend not to be shocked, because it was shocking. Personally, Jade had been ready to give up on his mother leaving her room ever again, for the same reasons he wondered if he’d ever be able to go back to school. It just didn’t seem possible. The normal, everyday world he’d once lived in didn’t exist anymore. It seemed perverse to try to squeeze himself back into the shape of it.

Ellie looked down at the lasagna with the same kind of disdain Jade felt for it, an emotion he doubted Sam was able to comprehend. “Not hungry,” she said, and her voice was ghostly; Jade wondered if she was solid, or merely the wisp-thin apparition she seemed.

Sam gave her a pleading look. “Mom?” Alisha, looking almost frightened, asked. “Are you okay?”

“Dad said you were worn out,” Gibson added, now that the silence in Munchkin-Land had been broken. “But I think you might have been sad.”

Alisha’s big, dark eyes immediately filled with tears, bottom lip quavering. It was like she could do it on command. Suddenly Jade was wrestled with the urge to smack her pretty face. Alisha was twelve, had been Jade and Smith’s sister her whole life, and yet… Jade was possessive of his grief. He didn’t want to share it with her. In his mind, in that moment, it seemed that Alisha was less _worthy_ of suffering than he, as if she did not have the _right_ to be in pain, to miss her big brother. Smith was _his_ to mourn, and no one else’s… or at least not these brats, these cuckoo eggs, trespassers in the family that had been Jade and Smith and Ellie, always somehow separate in Jade’s mind. And Ellie—she herself was a turncoat, for no one could pretend that her role in the ersatz family was not substantial. That meant that it was Jade, and Jade alone, who could _truly_ feel Smith’s loss. Who could _truly_ understand. Because he didn’t have anyone else. All the rest of them had each other, but Jade—Jade was alone.

 

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	3. 2 Weeks After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, boys are girls! You are about to embark on what is probably my favorite chapter ever. If you see something that you don't approve of, don't judge the boys yet! All will be absolved (or at least explained) by the end.

  
_People keep telling me that I lost you. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” they say. “He just lost his brother,” they whisper to each other. Or about Mom—“she just lost her son”. Well, that’s bullshit, Smith._

  
_We didn’t lose you. It’s not like, oops, where’d Smith go? Because I know exactly where you’ve gone. I saw the box when it was empty, I saw the box when it was full, and I watched them lower what was left of you into the mud. I know the exactly spot—earth freshly turned. Big fucking stone where your head should be. Got your name on it and everything._

_I swear to god, if I have to hear that one more time, I’ll just fucking snap. I didn’t_ lose _you. I know exactly where you are. You aren’t lost, Smith. And_ lose _—well, that’s not exactly a passive verb, is it?_ Lose _is active. Lose implies that… that I had you, and I put you somewhere, and then I forgot where I put you, and you just slipped between the cracks. That you’re still somewhere, and if I look hard enough, if I could only_ remember _, I’d find you again._

_It’s bullshit, Smith. That’s what I’m telling you._

_Oh, I almost forgot. I don’t really, I mean, I don’t actually… well, hate you. I mean, sometimes I do. That hasn’t changed. And maybe I hate you for new reasons now, instead of the old ones, but you’re my little brother. I’m always going to hate you. No matter what. Whether you borrowed my skateboard without asking or wrecked the awesome Lego ship I’d been building for, like, weeks, or spent too many hours fighting the current in the Bay, trying to get back to shore, and finally found the sand, just too late, too cold to ever be warm again._

_Fuck._

_I am so_ over _mourning, you know? Just_ done with it _. I don’t want to be sad anymore._

_I don’t ever want to be happy again, either._

_You selfish fucking bastard. I didn’t lose you. We didn’t_ lose _you._

_You left us._

_And yeah. I do. I_ do _hate you for that._

_You’re a fucking dickbrain._

_— Jade_

 

 

2 WEEKS AFTER

 

Hunter eyed the kid slouched next to him. His eyes were open, but that was the only indicator he might be conscious. Hunter would be surprised indeed if he turned out to be actually engaged in respiration. Maybe he was a waiting-room cyborg, designed to put patients more at ease. Or at least less self-conscious. Like: look, this sullen but attractive typical teen needs psychotherapy _just like you_! But Hunter didn’t think that was it. The kid looked too dead to be a comfort of any kind, even subliminally. Too dead—which is to say, too familiar to the people stuck in waiting rooms like this.

Poking a finger through a hole in his jeans, Hunter glanced sideways at the kid, as if he hadn’t been studying him intently only a moment ago. “Are you a mannequin?” he asked, hoping he sounded casual.

The kid turned his head slowly, hitting Hunter with two baleful brown eyes. _What are you, a retard?_ the eyes asked. Hunter refrained from answering the unspoken question, not wanting to seem crazy. Given where he was sitting and the current line of questioning, it was possible that he was already fighting against a bias.

“Not a mannequin, then,” Hunter decided aloud. “Neck movement,” he added, qualifying the decision. Didn’t want Zombie-to-the-Left-of-Him to think it was a hasty call. “You’re not a cyborg, are you?”

This time the kid blinked, slow and disbelieving. “No,” he said, very dryly.

“Human, then?” Hunter asked, just to make sure.

Zombie-to-the-Left turned his head back, to resume staring unseeingly at the wall. His face, once expressionless, was equipped with an irritated scowl now.  
Hunter, however, was not easily deterred. If he ever made up business cards, that’s what it would say on them. _Hunter Burgan. Not Easily Deterred._ He imagined it would look very official. “Never can be too sure,” Hunter explained, quirking a brow, not dissuaded from politeness anymore than he was easily deterred. He considered briefly changing the tagline on his business card, but decided to stick with the original. “I didn’t see you breathing is why I had to check. You know, the usual precautions.”

Annoyance creased Zombie-to-the-Left’s brow, and Hunter could practically read his mind. (Or, you know, rotting brains.) “Wondering if I’m worth the effort of moving a seat over? I mean, the gesture seems blatantly rude enough to get the point across, doesn’t it? But then again, you don’t know me, and so far I seem to be just obnoxious enough to miss the symbolism, or worse, just move down a seat with you. And god knows you don’t want to seat-hop around the increasingly uncomfortable chairs of your shrink’s waiting room chased by someone who’s obviously unstable.”

Zombie-to-the-Left frowned, looking back at Hunter.  
“And really, what can you say? I mean, how does one even _approach_ a response to a diatribe like that?” Hunter supplemented, giving Zombie his most relaxed smile. The effect still left him looking slightly deranged. It was probably because of his eyes. He’d always thought they were set too widely. Maybe that should go on the business cards? “In case you can’t tell,” he added conspiratorially, “I’m totally undaunted by your apparent unwillingness to engage in conversation. All the magazines in here are from months ago, and how long can you watch a bunch of asshole fish swim around, really? There’s nothing else to do. Besides which—and you might want to write this down, because I don’t have a card yet—I’m not easily deterred.”

Zombie was still just staring at him, a strange hybrid of fear, annoyance, and utter distaste twisting his features. Hunter sighed. He’d never encountered someone so uncooperative in the waiting room before. Even the receptionist would talk to him, now that he’d worn her down. Most people, here for the worst reasons of all, he could make smile. Some even laughed. Zombie was not even giving him a chance.

“Let me guess.” Hunter ventured quietly into that area he least wanted to talk about, especially with a new friend. “It’s recent for you. You just lost somebody. You don’t want to talk about it, ever. And especially not today. It’s too soon, it’s too hard, you’re not ready, it’s not fair, why can’t they just let you grieve your own way?”

At this, Zombie got to his feet, face suddenly filling with blood. He really benefitted from a little color on his cheeks, Hunter noted. Zombie towered above Hunter—what with him being quite tall, and Hunter being seated. He looked down at Hunter like he might hit him, over and over, till his brains came out his mouth; but the receptionist, always good-hearted, intervened just in time.

“Jade?” she called out. “Right this way.”

Zombie paused to shoot Hunter one more deep, loathing glare. “I didn’t _lose_ anyone,” he hissed down. “It’s not like I fucking misplaced him.”

Zombie turned on heel, scowling all the while, and slouched out of the waiting room and into the corridor.  
Hunter nodded thoughtfully, reflecting. “A worthy adversary,” he decided aloud, watching Zombie’s back recede.

 

 

Daniel Harmon smiled, in a way that Jade imagined was designed to put him at ease. “My name is Dan,” he said, offering his hand, tan with average length fingers and hair on the knuckles, to shake. “It’s nice to meet you, Jade.”

As if independent from his body, Jade’s own large, long-fingered hand rose to meet Daniel’s. Jade had always been a good-natured boy, even-tempered and kind, or at least not unduly cruel. He was caught up in foul moods no more often than any other boy of his age, and he had an easy smile that was more often than not at home on his face. But all that had changed, two weeks ago, when he’d watched his brother die. Now, it was apathy he was most familiar with. Anger, despair, bitterness and loathing and grief so thick he’d choked on it; but the thread that stitched the fits and lulls together was apathy. It wasn’t that he was rude; it was that he simply couldn’t be bothered either way. But it seemed his limbs, at least, remembered themselves, their old roles. Hands were shaken, a mumbled greeting exchanged. Daniel invited Jade to sit, and his knees buckled of their own accord; then came silence, and what Jade had been dreading most.

Daniel, in predictable shrink behavior, wanted to talk. Not just about anything. He wanted to talk about _it_.

“Let’s do the hard stuff first, all right?” Daniel asked, flashing that same disconcertingly likable smile, this time soft with pity. “You’re an adult, you don’t need to be patronized or played with; I think we should jump right into it. I’d like to talk about your brother.”

Some of Jade’s breath hissed out between his teeth, inadvertent. He said nothing; Daniel filled the silence. “Your mother told me about it when she made the appointment. Your younger brother Smith, am I right? Were you two close?”

 _He’s not close to anything anymore_ , Jade thought desperately, unable to speak. What was the point in talking about him? What was the point in acting like he’d ever existed? Death was retroactive. It disrupted continuity. It altered history. It hadn’t just erased Smith’s future, it had erased Smith entirely. Every thought he’d ever had, every memory; every word he’d ever spoken, every dream. It was all gone, gone so thoroughly it was like it had never existed. The past was meaningless. Jade knew it, and Daniel probably knew it too. There was no point. Life ends in death. Everything does. Nothing they could say or do would change that.

Daniel gave Jade an appraising look, as if reading his thoughts. “It’s not pointless, Jade, to talk about your brother. Just painful.”

“What, am I supposed to keep him alive through my memories or something?” Jade asked suddenly, abruptly, angrily, voice choked. It was something someone had said at the funeral. _He’ll always live in our memories_. Well, that was bullshit. “Because he’s dead, Dan, and there’s no point in pretending he’s not.”

Daniel nodded, face carefully expressionless. “You’re right, Jade. You’re very right. I’m glad you understand that. There’s nothing we can do for him now. You being here, you thinking about him, talking about him, dealing with the feelings you have, they won’t do a damn bit of good for your brother. But it’s not him that we’re worried about, when we’re here. It’s not him that we’re thinking about. It’s you. It’s your wellbeing that we’re here to be concerned with.” He paused, giving Jade a scrutinizing look. Jade kept his face as blank as possible, knowing his brow was creased anyway, his nostrils flared. “Now,” Daniel said, “if you don’t mind. I had wondered if you and your brother were close?”

Jade was a little startled by this. Psychiatrists—weren’t they all stuffy old men in tweed jackets who hemmed and hawed and let you express your feelings at your leisure? Weren’t they supposed to be gentle, wishy-washy, careful of your feelings? Did Daniel not realize who was paying him for his time? Did he not realize that Jade was a customer? Because this was not customer service. It was pushy and brash and—

His throat was tight, his eyes stinging. Jade was surprised to realize how close to tears he was.

“Yeah, I mean, kind of,” he said quietly, not fighting it. “I mean… we didn’t really… I was really busy, I mean, but…” Jade looked up at Daniel helplessly. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, we were close.”

Daniel nodded emphatically. “Tell me about how he died,” he said. Jade froze, stared.

“Jesus, don’t you have that on file or something? Can’t you look it up?” he finally asked.

“Because that way you wouldn’t have to talk about it,” Daniel said, eyebrows raised.

“Well… yeah,” Jade said helplessly. “I mean… yeah.”

Daniel nodded sharply. “Right, right. Because that’s why you’re here; to not talk about it.”

Jade’s mouth fell open. He closed it again. “Listen, I—this is hard, all right? This is hard. I don’t know how… I mean, I don’t know what… I just…” Daniel remained impassive. Jade grasped at words. Finally he spit out the only thing he could think of. “I… I’ve been writing him letters. Since he died.”

Daniel’s face broke out in a smile. “Good,” he said gently. “That’s good. It’s a hell of a start.”

 

 

Adam scuffed his feet idly across the carpet. Dave shot him a look of irritation. “What,” Dave asked curtly, “is your _problem_?”

Adam had been about to ask the same. Dave, though rarely a ray of sunshine, had been record-breakingly nasty the last few weeks. Ever since. That, Adam supposed, was an answer itself. Maybe being even more of a pain in the ass was Dave’s way of coping. He’d been close to Smith, closer than Adam himself had ever been. Logic, however, was only a small voice, lost in the tide of frustration. Adam didn’t want to be patient. He was tired of tolerating abuse. If everyone else got to act like freaks and call it a grieving process, why couldn’t he?

“Right now? You are,” Adam shot back gruffly. “Get off my fucking case.”

Suddenly Dave was on his feet, standing straight-backed as if his full height was even remotely formidable. Right in Adam’s face, he sneered. “You’re pathetic, you know that?”

And it was enough. Adam stood too, almost a foot taller than his friend, and stared down at Dave as menacingly as possible. “Yeah?” he asked through gritted teeth. “Why’s that?”

The thing about Dave was, he’d always been pugnacious. He didn’t back down. He jutted out his angular chin and glared right back. “Because you’re in love with him,” he snarled, “and you’re too afraid to do anything about it. Always have been.”

Adam didn’t quail either. Dave, at seventeen, was full of the kind of blood and fire that was already a memory to Adam, a few months shy of twenty. But Adam wasn’t about to back down. He’d known Dave most of his life, and Adam knew that he wasn’t the sort you could allow to take liberties. Let him think he was in control, and he’d never stop.

“Maybe you didn’t know,” Adam said evenly, “but Smith is dead. So maybe me being worried about Jade isn’t a romantic thing, yeah? Maybe I’m a—what do you call it— _decent human being_.”

If Dave was put off by the implication, he didn’t show it. “Wouldn’t know what that’s like, would I,” he sneered, still glaring defiantly up into Adam’s expressionless face. The least he could do, Dave thought privately, was have the grace to look defensive. “So listen—consider something for me. Pretend that, instead of being worried about how your best friend is coping with his brother’s death—pretend that your best friend _is_ dead. And tell me how that feels.”

They’d reached a stalemate. Unless either boy was willing to start swinging, there was nothing left to say. They could trade cheap insults—poke holes in the ramshackle suits of armor they’d built around themselves in response to the death of a friend; they could continue to stand and glower, ineffectually; or they could forsake enough pride to let the ruse collapse, as empty inside as they were.

Adam sank back onto his bed, slumping at the waist, head in hands. Dave’s face crumpled and he let himself fold up on the floor, small and fragile. A sob, not quite muffled, escaped him; Adam lifted his head, eyes red and wet.

“Hey,” Adam said softly, sliding off the bed to sit facing Dave. He put a large hand on his friend’s shaking shoulder. “It’s all right, Dave.”

Dave raised his face from his knees, features screwed up, tear streaked. He didn’t look sad—he looked helpless, angry, drowning, lost. “It isn’t,” he said, voice cracking , hands balled into fists. “It won’t be.”

And Adam didn’t know what to say. He knew what he was supposed to say—it’s all right, everything’s going to be okay—but Dave was right. It wasn’t okay. It wouldn’t be okay. So what could he say?

 

 

When Zombie emerged from Dan’s office, Hunter was ready—a cougar, prepared to strike. He leaned against the wall, casual at first glance, while Zombie—now, curiously, to his right—had a brief exchange with the receptionist. Zombie turned and registered no reaction to Hunter’s presence.

“Figured you’d go over,” Hunter said by way of greeting, falling into step with Zombie. “With Dan, I mean. Good ol’ Danny. Always wants a lot out of first-timers. Tries to scare the fakers away. Yup, gotten quite cynical in his old age, Danny has.” Hunter squinted at his quarry, now trudging across the parking lot towards an old, but well-kept, Dodge pick-up. “Don’t look like a faker, though. One of those scammers—attention whores. We get a lot of those in here. Less than other places, obviously—bereavement attracts fewer because, let’s face it, the prereqs are pretty steep.” Hunter paused as Zombie fumbled with his keys. “Listen, don’t you ever say anything? I mean, I’m kind of carrying the conversation, here. It’s starting to feel like this relationship is one-sided. We all gotta pull our own weight, you know what I’m saying? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

Zombie hefted himself into the driver’s seat and gave Hunter a dead-eyed stare for his efforts. “How long have you been doing this?” he finally asked, sighing.

Gratified, Hunter flashed Zombie a brilliant grin. “Grieving? Just over a year. Aggressive networking, general creepifying, and refusing to be deterred? Probably my whole life.”

Zombie gave Hunter a look deserving of his name. “Does it get easier?”

Hunter, sensing he was probably more interested in the former, let his smile fade, lose its shine. “No,” he said hoarsely, honestly. “It doesn’t. But I can help.”

Zombie, seatbelted, hand on the door, reading to slam it, Hunter’s body be damned, and peel out of the gloomy lot, hesitated. Something almost human flickered in his flat brown eyes. “How?” he asked, and Hunter knew he was in.

“Here,” he told Zombie, palming over a small Ziploc containing seven pink pills. “You’re new at this, yeah? So let’s not exceed one tablet by mouth daily till the training wheels come off.”

Zombie took the baggie uncertainly. “What… are these?”

“Help,” Hunter said simply, complete with sincere smile, soft eyes. “Trial run’s on me. I’ll have another set on me next week, if you find yourself entranced. Like I said, I don’t have a card—yet—but I’ll be in touch.”

Mission accomplished, Hunter thought in what he hoped was a suave kind of way. Say what you would for Zombie, still idling perplexed in the lot; in the end, he hadn’t been a hard sell.

Hunter strolled back into his own appointment whistling. “Feel better?” Dana, his seventh grief counselor, asked, pretty brows raised in legitimate concern. Ah, ignorance is bliss.

Hunter nodded, showing her his confident smile, his brave smile, his doing-my-best-as-a-poor-little-orphan smile. “Fresh air always helps,” he said, white teeth glinting.

 

 

Jade sat in Adam’s driveway, contemplating the pink pills. There must be something very wrong in a person’s life, he decided, when they seriously consider taking the mystery pills some creep in a shrink’s office gave them. But then again… help, he’d said. Help. And he’d seemed to mean it. Embarrassing as it was, at twenty Jade had no experience with drugs. That had always been Smith’s area of expertise. And wasn’t that ironic—Smith probably could have told him at a glance the name, class, and chemical properties of the pills he was holding. But of course, if Smith were here and able to tell him that, Jade wouldn’t be contemplating the pills in the first place. Catch-22.

Help, the weird kid had said. A quantum of solace. Well—that probably ruled out hallucinogens, right? It wasn’t anything that would fuck him up too badly, probably. Not if he could take one every day. Not if Hunter—who he found himself thinking more and more fondly of—hadn’t warned him not to drive, or operate heavy machinery, or in general try get up and walk around or anything while taking them. Were they dangerously narcotic? Well, that was possible. But they looked more like prescription meds than anything—like the light blue ones his mother had been taking with breakfast, for all that she told Gibson they were vitamins.

Well, there was nothing else to it. After all, what did he have to lose?

Nothing, anymore. He’d already lost so much.

 

 

Adam’s head jerked up when the doorbell chimed. Dave tried not to sigh audibly. He was like a dog—salivating, excitable. It was actually painful to watch. Degrading. Pathetic.

“I’ll get the door, you fucking queer,” Dave grumbled, getting to his feet. “You can fix your face.” Adam was already scrubbing at his damp red eyes with his sleeve, trying to destroy the evidence.

Dave plodded down the well-worn stairs, wondering why he’d done it. Volunteered to get the door. Yeah—it was probably Jade. And yeah—Adam looked like shit. He was convinced that, if he let Jade see how fucked up he was over Smith, he’d let their friend down. Like he needed to be strong, or Jade might fall apart. Like he was the fucking pillar of strength that held up the sky. Whatever. There was something else, though. It wasn’t like Dave to go out of his way to do something nice for Adam, especially when it came to Jade. Maybe it was the possibility of _Jade_ looking like shit—all red- or dead-eyed. He knew it would just tear into Adam, open up his wounds all over again. There was nothing Ads hated like not being able to protect the people he loved. Dave watched the hurt of Smith’s death unfold across Adam’s face a million times a day, when he realized how helpless he was, how helpless everyone was, that there was nothing anyone could have done. And he watched the self-loathing next, Adam hating himself for not being there to help anyway. Seeing how deep Jade’s own pain cut Adam was just too much hurt for any of them, and he’d do his best to prevent it if he could.

Besides all that, there was always the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Dave was feeling a little scummy for the way he’d been acting. Not like he’d done anything wrong—just that this shit wasn’t easy for any of them. They’d all been close to Smith. They’d all loved him, in their ways. And they were the last people he wanted to punish for his loss—because they were the only people who understood.

It was just hard. That was all. Adjusting and all that shit—it was hard.

Dave shook his head as if it would make his thoughts scatter, and pulled open the Carsons’ front door.

Sure enough, it was Jade. His eyes were wide and empty as ever, something not unlike recognition stirring below their shallowness as he registered the opening door, his friend within. This shred of a reaction was the only indication he wasn’t entirely hollow. This, Dave felt, was worse than any amount of tears, of expressed pain. After all—that was what shrinks were for, right? Healing? Dave’s own mother had been lobbying to get him into one. But Jade looked the same as ever, and that frightened Dave. What was the point? The deadness on Jade’s face meant, maybe, that things would never be like they used to. That they could never go back, not any of them. And… what was the point of anything, if that was true? What was the point of any of it?

“Hey,” Dave said loosely, doing his best to ignore his thoughts. It was hard to predict how— _if_ —Jade would respond to things these days. But to Dave’s immense surprise, Jade looked right into his eyes.

“Hey,” he said back, voice light, relatively unguarded. Unfeeling—but at the very least, responsive. At the very least, with some of the weight dropped from his shoulders, from his heart.

Dave just about fainted with relief. Relief, and something not entirely separate from happiness. For a while, it had seemed like he’d lost two friends. Maybe—just maybe—the shrink would help. Maybe—just maybe—Jade was coming back.

“How was your thing?” Dave asked, stepping aside to let Jade in.

Jade shrugged, walking into the house. “Weird,” he said decisively.

“D’you think it’ll… you know… help?” Dave asked, hoping he wasn’t pushing it, biting his tongue.

Jade struck his hand in his pocket as if casting around for something. “Help?” he repeated. “We’ll see.”

 

 

End Notes:

Your gracious feedback is, as always, appreciated.

And P.S.--anyone catch the geek reference?

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	4. 2 1/2 Weeks After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back again! Another short one--next one's much longer. But I think this one's important... I don't own the boys, but the following did happen. I'm borrowing Smith's story, with respect and necessary alterations; it was first told to me by an eleven-year-old boy at grief camp.

_Brother, I don’t feel a thing._

_Well—that’s not true. I do feel some things. I feel the hole in me, the one you left. But it’s… different, somehow. Not any less gaping… not any less a void… only, less urgent. Quieter. Like it’s been draped over with gauze, smoky grey, and I can’t really see it properly anymore. Like it’s obscured by fog, so when I reach out my hand to feel it, I have to grope around, trying to get at it. And I find it again… but the edges aren’t so raw or bloody. Instead, they feel like wet velvet… scarred satin. The inside of a coffin, after too much time has passed. Distant… not entirely real… not entirely part of me._   
_But that’s how everything feels. Not entirely part of me. I don’t even feel entirely like part of me._

_It’s wonderful._

_It’s—well, it’s the best thing that’s happened to me since you… since you died._

_You know what, Smith?_ I forgive you _. I mean… it’s not really altogether a feeling, forgiveness… and it’s not like something I’m really_ giving _or_ relinquishing _or_ forgetting _. It’s more like… it’s more like leaving something in the other room, and you know exactly where you put it, you can even picture it in your mind, but you can’t quite place the feeling, like it’s in the back of your head, like it’s déjà vu or something. And when you go back into that room, chasing that weird non-feeling, whatever you left isn’t there anymore. That’s what happened to all the anger I felt. It’s just sort of…_ no longer present _. Like maybe it’s lost, and I’ll find it again, but I don’t have any real sense of where it went, where I left it._

_You know?_

_Listen. This isn’t time’s course healing all wounds. This isn’t natural healing at all. It’s these pills, pink and sort of oblong, the size of Alisha’s pinky nail, that I’ve been swallowing in the morning. I’m not sure yet what they are… they make me a little nauseous… like, dizzy almost… but I don’t even care. I don’t even care, Smith, because_ I can’t feel you anymore _. Whether you’re here or not, I_ can’t feel it _. It’s like I don’t even know._

_It’s like you never left._

_It’s like you never were here at all._

_And like I said, brother:_

_It’s wonderful._

_— Jade_

 

 

2 ½ WEEKS AFTER

 

Adam let his feet hang off the edge of the dock, bare toes skimming the water. It was autumn in East Bay—growing cooler by the day. The water was icy, the ever-present breeze raising goosebumps on his legs, bare from the knees down.

He stared out into the water and wondered.

The dock had always been one of their favorite places. They’d sit there, look out over things; Adam would smoke cigarettes, share a beer or two with Smith. They’d swim, if the mood took them; harass passing boaters; stare out into the darkening water under a darkening sky. It was listless summer nights, and chilly winter ones. He’d never dreamed…

Adam closed his eyes, shuddering when the water lapped his heel. It had always seemed so harmless. They were Bay brats—they’d faced down a vast landscape of water every day of their lives. They’d never feared it.

He thought back to the day, not so long ago. Jade, home for the first time since he’d left for his second year at Berkeley; Smith and Dave seniors in high school; Adam taking classes at UCSF, commuting from home. Ellie and Sam had taken out their boat, brought the whole family; Adam and Dave, bored, hanging around the dock working on their sunburns. It was the last truly beautiful day of the year, the final week of September; the storm had blown in out of nowhere. Dark clouds and ripping winds—the dock had begun to sway in the force of the current, the slamming waves. The Bay, usually placid, churning with whitecaps. Adam and Dave had run back to Adam’s, seeking shelter from the rain that was blowing in. They’d been in the basement, still soggy, when they’d gotten the call.

Sam, Smith, and Jade had been in the water, swimming. They were far out from the anchored boat; when the current got too rough to swim in and they tried to swim back to the boat, it was gone. The current, the wind, had dragged it away, out of sight in thickening fog. Adam was fuzzy on the details; for obvious reasons, it hadn’t really been explained to him in depth. From what he’d gleaned, Sam and the boys realized their only option was to swim to shore, a vague strip of sand they could just make out on the horizon. The worst part was that they had all made it; the Coast Guard had picked up Ellie and the kids; Sam and his stepsons had made it to shore. They’d been exhausted by the time they reached the beach, having fought against the current the whole way; fatigued, and freezing. Smith, though, the slimmest of the three, was more than shivering. He was shaking uncontrollably, limbs in spasms. A lifeguard had wrapped him in rescue blankets; the shivering didn’t stop. Soon he was coughing—and then choking, choking on blood-tinged foam.

And then he was dead.

Hypothermia. There was nothing anyone could do. His body simply got too cold. His body got so cold that it wouldn’t ever be warm again.

Most bodies cool, when they stop living. What Adam wondered was, did Smith’s get warmer?

Wake from a passing late-season boat washed over Adam’s feet. He opened his eyes, shivering. Water, even this water, was more sinister than he’d ever imagined—than any of them had. It didn’t take life away—it just swallowed it up.q95;

 

 

End Notes:

P.S. I'm turning twenty in a matter of hours!

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	5. 19 Days After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to school really kills my desire to write. Or live. Join the rebellion against homework and give me some feedback!

  
_I think about the stuff I used to care about. I mean, really stupid, petty shit. Like—I’ve never really liked Sam. I always feel kind of supplanted in our family, like an impostor, because Dad, our real dad, is god knows where. Well—someone knows where, because he was at the funeral. With his girlfriend, if you can believe it. She kept yawning. And Dad was a mess. I mean, his suit was all stained and shit, and he was just fucking_ blubbering _. He kept trying to hug me. Now that I’m an adult, he doesn’t need visitation rights or anything, he kept saying. Why don’t I call him sometime. Why don’t I come by. And I kept thinking, why didn’t he want to see me before this? Why didn’t he want to see us when we were both alive? Anyway, shit like that. Shit like how much I used to care about what you guys thought about me. I used to look forward to hanging out with Adam, and dread going to that Social Problems class because it was always so depressing. I used to get into fights with my roommate at Berkeley, really serious fights, and I’d call home to vent about it to Adam, sometimes even you. I used to think all the time about what I could get Mom for Christmas._

_And I am so glad that shit doesn’t matter anymore, because I don’t want more._   
_I want less._

_— Jade_

 

 

 

19 DAYS AFTER

 

Dave lay on his back on Jade’s floor, studying the poster-covered ceiling intently. Jade was staring down at his hands. What struck Dave as odd about it was that it didn’t seem like boredom, but not like fascination either. It was almost like Jade was a powered down robot. Stuck in a pose, with nothing inside; not happy or sad, not living or dead.

“When are you going back to Berkeley? Do you know?” Dave finally said, making conversation. There was a series of uncomfortable questions on his tongue. He figured that this was not the worst thing he could ask.

Jade did not look up. “Dunno,” he grunted, and that was all.

“I went back last week,” Dave put in helpfully. “To school, I mean. It’s… weird. I mean, at Berkeley, no one will know unless you tell them. But at North, everyone knows. They even had a memorial service. They keep giving me these looks… No one really wants to talk to me. Like maybe I’ll start bawling if they say hi.”

Dave looked up to check Jade’s reaction. There wasn’t one. He didn’t move, or speak, or show any signs of hearing.

A frown of annoyance flashed across Dave’s face, but Jade didn’t see it. “You want me to call Adam? I know he wants to see you.”

Jade glanced irritably at Dave, who was apparently interrupting some deep and important meditation. “He’s always here,” he said flatly. “Why does he always want to be here?”

Dave knew that Jade didn’t truly mind that they were always around. In the summer, there was an idle drift and coalescence of their friendship. But now that Jade was home and Smith was gone, it seemed like none of them could do anything but suffer together, wandering oddly through pale days.

“ _I’m_ always here,” Dave pointed out helpfully. Apparently these days he was Adam’s great defender. “And so are you. You’re his best friend, man. Where else would he want to be right now?”

Jade sat up, reaching for the glass of water on his nightstand. He opened the drawer and pulled out a Ziploc bag, with three pink pills in it. Not showing any sign he’d heard his friend, he put a tablet on his tongue and washed it down with the water.

“What’s that?” Dave asked cautiously, not entirely sure if he wanted to know the answer.

“Don’t know,” Jade answered dully. “Keeps me… calm.”

“Is it from your shrink?” Dave pressed.

“Yeah, I got it after my appointment,” Jade said vaguely. Dave was satisfied with that.

“Is that why you’ve been so…?” he started to ask before he thought better of it.

“So what?” Jade asked, a splinter of light in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Dave backpedaled. “Out of it, I guess. Like you don’t care about anything.”

Jade stared at Dave in disbelief, as if _he_ were the conversational failure. “I _don’t_ care about anything, Dave. …I saw him die,” he said slowly, quietly, as if speaking to someone either very young or very stupid. “I—watched—him— _die_. Okay? Do you understand that? He died right in front of me. Sam couldn’t do anything. The lifeguard couldn’t do anything. _I_ couldn’t do anything. None of you, _no one_ , could fucking _do_ anything. And he—just—died.”

“I’m sorry,” Dave said, voice all but a whisper, not looking at Jade. It was suddenly hard to speak around the lump in his throat. He hadn’t heard Jade talk about it before. Hell, _he_ hadn’t talked about it before. Being confronted with Jade’s pain like that… how horribly inferior Dave’s own loss was, best friend versus brother… it made him want to look away from himself, from his thoughts, to step back and frown as if that shell of a body had never been part of him.

But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t do that, so he tried something else. Instead of falling into shattered silence, he kept going. Kept talking. Pushed a little harder. “It’s just… we miss you. Me and Adam, and… Smith is gone, I know he is, and he was… he was my best friend. It’s just… I don’t like losing you too.”

For all his honesty, what Dave got was a slap in the face. “Look the fuck at me,” Jade snapped, more feeling in his voice than before. “Do you see me, sitting here? Because I’m right the fuck in front of you. I’m alive. My organs are healthy and whole. My body’s not broken. I’m breathing. My blood’s moving. _It wasn’t me_. It should have been, I wish it had been, but it wasn’t me. I’m right the fuck here. I haven’t gone fucking _anywhere_.” Jade’s voice cracked at the last, and his eyes looked suddenly wet. Dave, transfixed, couldn’t look away. It was like watching a layer peel off, watching Jade come alive again.

Jade fumbled another pill out of his bedside table, breathing hard, panicky. He dropped it in his mouth and swallowed it desperately, swallowed it dry. “Fuck you,” he whispered, his voice small. He dropped back on his bed and covered his face with a pillow. A sound distinctly like crying was not entirely muffled. Dave got to his feet, hovered between his friend and the door. Unsure of what to do. Useless.

 

 

“Ads? It’s Dave,” the familiar voice, dropped to a whisper, came over the phone. “I’m at Jade’s.”

“Oh, hey,” Adam said, at once relieved and annoyed. He was at Jade’s? It was going on 5 pm. He’d been done with classes for hours. Nice to know they’d planned on calling him eventually. And—why had Jade called Dave when he got off school, and not Adam? Why had Jade wanted to see Dave more than him? Had he done something wrong? Or—god, was it just that none of this was going to work out? That none of their friendships would last? That no manner of love could survive a catastrophe like this? He tried to make his voice sound less strained, normal. “What’s up?”

“Well, how soon can you be here? I sort of need your help,” Dave said, still whispering.

Adam’s temper flared at that. So that was why they’d finally remembered him. Something had come up. His help was required, even where his company had not been desired. Well, hell, who can say no to friends like that?

“Yeah, that’s cool, but I’m in the middle of something,” Adam lied coolly. It wasn’t a total lie. He was currently wrestling with Daisy, his dog, and thinking very seriously about starting his calculus homework.

Dave’s voice rose in pitch, becoming somewhat panicky. “Yeah? Like, something crucial? ‘Cause I don’t know what to do, Ads, and—”

“Oh, yeah, it’s pretty crucial,” Adam said, taking sick joy in turning Dave down, in refusing the invitation he’d been hoping for all day. He tugged at the rope braid Daisy had in her teeth and she growled playfully. “I mean, I don’t think I can just—”

“He’s crying,” Dave said in a rush. “He’s locked in his room and I can hear him crying and he won’t let me in, and I think he took more of his meds than he was meant to, and I don’t know what to do, and I need you, _Jade_ needs you—”

Adam felt his heart ice over immediately. It was something that should have softened him—Jade in trouble, Jade upset, the Adam he was comfortable being would have dropped everything, even things that were truly important, to be there and do what he could to help. But bitter jealousy and mangled pride were rising up, in the way. He hadn’t even fucking _known_ Jade had meds. “You’ve known him just as long as I have,” Adam said in a clipped voice. “You know him just as well as I do. What can I possibly do that you aren’t capable of?”

“What the hell, Adam! I can hear Daisy—I know you’re playing with your dog—so just get your ass over here!” Dave snapped.

“It’s cool, man,” Adam said, made of ice. “You can handle it, yeah?”

And he hung up the phone.

 

 

Dave’s voice carried through the door, even over the heavy staccato of his fist pounding on it, better than he seemed to think it did. Even pissed off, even drugged up, even crying, Jade was powerless to stop a smile from worming across his face at what he was hearing.

“OKAY, SO ADAM’S BEING A BIT OF A CUNT RIGHT NOW—oh, hi, Mrs. Nichols, I’m really sorry about—wow, okay, if you didn’t hear that, you _are_ crazy—do you hear me speaking to you at _all_? You’re in a bad way, Mrs.—fine, yeah, just walk away from me, that’s cool—” and he heard Dave take a deep breath—“ANYWAY, LIKE I WAS SAYING, ADS IS A C-WORD, SO—Jesus, do you people just hang out in the hall or something?”

“What’s a C-word?” Gibson’s bright inquiry was clearly audible through the door as well.

Dave’s voice. “Um, a sea word—sea like the ocean—so, I mean, like ‘dolphin’ or ‘ship’ or—”

Gibson, speculatively. “Adam isn’t a sea word. It’s a name. Yeah, but it’s like a Bible word! I just remembered. Like Adam and Eve.” Gibson stopped to think. “I don’t think the sea is even part of the Bible until Noah builds his ark on the Red Sea.”

Dave. “Um, I don’t think that’s quite—”

Silence.

Gibson again, with a pronouncement. “Adam isn’t a sea word.”

Jade trying his hardest not to laugh out loud.

Dave, floundering, a terrible liar. “Um, well, sure he is. I mean—um—he’s like a—uh—pirate. Yeah, he’s like a pirate. Which is to say—I mean—what I was trying to say is—Adam’s like a pirate, like, a thief, or a, um, scoundrel or something.”

Gibson, seriously. “He doesn’t have an eye patch. _Or_ a wooden leg. _Or_ a boat. We have a boat, though.” A pause. And then, triumphantly, Gibson: “Like Moses!” Another pause. “Except that Moses had an ark.”

“Oo-kay,” Dave said, and Jade could imagine him shaking his head, eyes rolling. “Yes. Sure. That’s fabulous. Anyway, I’m trying to scream at your brother through this door, so—”

“I only have one brother,” Jade heard Gibson say. It wasn’t quite sadness. It was more wonderment, as if he hadn’t decided what to make of it yet. It was not unlike bragging. “I used to have two.”

“Yeah, I know.” Dave, sotto voce. “You think I don’t know?”

Jade imagined Gibson, shrugging his shoulders, hands buried in his pockets, looking intently at the carpet. “No,” he said. So quietly Jade strained to hear it. “I know you know. I was just saying. Smith died.”

Dave’s voice, after a moment, came again. This time it was strained. “I know that too. I loved him very much, Gibs. But right now—” A deep breath. “Right now, I’m sort of in the middle of screaming at Jade through this door, okay? So I’m going to, um, finish that up. So if you wanted to—”

“Do you need me to help you?” Gibson asked. “Mom says that I am very shrill. She always says, ‘No yelling’ and ‘why is his voice so _shrill_?’, just like that. So probably I could help you.”

Dave laughed lightly, probably at the accuracy of Gibson’s impression of his mother. “Thanks for the offer, really, but if you could just go somewhere else, yeah? That would be really helpful.”

“Okay,” Gibson agreed sagely. “But if you need help yelling, please remember that I’m very good at it.”

Jade heard Dave’s quiet laugh again. “Thank you. I—thank you, Gibson.” There was a moment of silence, and then—  
“JADE? YEAH, HI, I’M STILL OUT HERE. ADAM IS, APPARENTLY, A BIBLE WORD—PLEASE DON’T ASK—SO YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH ME, OKAY? I’M SORRY ABOUT THAT, BELIEVE ME, BUT I WILL DO MY BEST. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS OPEN THE DOOR, BECAUSE YOU SHOULDN’T BE ALONE AND, FRANKLY, THE AMOUNT OF TRAFFIC IN YOUR HALLWAY IS BECOMING RIDICULOUS.”

“Why are you yelling?” came Alisha’s voice, very critical in her knowledgeable twelve-year-old way. Jade had to bury his face in his damp pillow all over again just to stifle the sound of his laughter. Alisha had not long ago developed a raging crush on Dave, and was always trying to impress him. It was probably too late, considering that, when she was six, she’d vomited corn dogs and cotton candy all over him at a theme park.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” said Dave exasperatedly.

“What?” Alisha asked. “That doesn’t mean anything. Why are you—”

“Because Jade’s inside and I’m trying to talk to him!” Dave explained, less than patiently.

Jade heard Alisha’s gum crack. That’s how thin the walls were. “The walls are very thin,” she told Dave, matching his irritation word for word. “I can hear you all the way down the hall. In _my_ room. So he can probably hear you in there, just fine, without you screaming.”

There was a long period of silence. Alisha’s gum cracked again. “Also,” she said, and Jade imagined Dave biting back a scream, “you can really just jimmy open the door. I mean, the lock doesn’t work properly. That’s why I wouldn’t switch rooms with him even if he asked, even if his _is_ the biggest one, which isn’t fair. It doesn’t even stay locked. See?” Alisha rattled the knob in its socket, and the lock popped free. “So if you would please stop yelling, _some_ of us can’t even hear their own _stereos_ over all the racket.” Alisha paused before adding critically, “And you shouldn’t lie to Gibson. He’ll believe you.”

Dave’s knuckles rapped softly on the door a moment later. “Hey, Jade? I’m coming in, all right?” he called softly, trying not to sound as flustered as Jade could tell he was.

Jade used his sleeve to mop some of the tears, forgotten once the laughter had started, off his cheeks. “Yeah, okay,” he said, at normal volume.

Dave swung open the door and stepped in, looking somewhat abashed. “Your family—” he started, forgetting that his mission had been to comfort and care for. That was typical Dave. He didn’t really handle emotional baggage with the grace Adam did. But Jade didn’t mind it. He was actually feeling much better, if a little sleepy. The pinks must be kicking in, he thought.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, going so far as to smile. “I heard.”

Dave stopped trying to hide his exasperation. He threw his hands in the air. “Well, Jesus! Couldn’t you have helped me out?”

“Shh, you’re yelling again,” Jade said helplessly, laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. “Alisha—won’t be able to hear—her _stereo_.”

The end of his sentence was drowned out in their laughter, and it was good to feel normal again, if only for a little while.

 

 

Boys were such _idiots_ , Alisha thought, flipping her hair over her shoulder in irritation. First Dave was doing all that _yelling_ ; _then_ they decided they’d laugh like some kind of lunatics; and now someone was clearly ringing the doorbell downstairs and she would bet _anything_ it was Adam, and apparently they expected _her_ to let him in like some kind of _servant_ or something.

Not to mention they were totally blocking out her Spice Girls tape, which could _not_ be played any louder unless she wanted to be totally obnoxious and _rude_ like they were being. And Alisha was _so_ not sinking to their level.

Alisha huffed down the stairs. It was definitely about time Adam showed up. Mom had been so out of it ever since what Alisha thought of as _the accident_ or _the tragedy_ , depending on how dramatic she was feeling, that Alisha had stolen some of her mascara a few days ago and even had some _on_ today, and her so-called mother hadn’t even _noticed_. But all of that was okay, Alisha decided, if she answered the door and Adam was there, she looked so totally glamorous and grown-up that he would _finally_ realize he was madly in love with her. They were like _destined_ to get married. Alisha knew this because it was practically like a law that you had to fall in love with your older brother’s best friend. For a while, she had thought that maybe Dave was her One True Love, but she had grown out of _that_ childish phase.

Alisha glanced at her reflection in the hall mirror, smoothing down her long dark hair. Gibson and Dad were both blond, but Alisha looked _just_ like her mother. Everyone said so. That meant dark hair, so brown it looked black, and giant eyes that everyone said were brown but Alisha liked to think of as copper.

She took a deep breath, and rounded the corner. Sure enough, Adam was standing at the door. Alisha flounced over to it, thinking how even their names sounded cute together. Adam and Alisha. A-dum and A-leesha. How could she _ever_ have thought that _Dave_ was her soul mate? She had been _so_ immature.

Alisha fluttered her eyelashes at Adam, hoping he’d notice how long and beautiful and adult they looked. He’d _better_ —she’d only stabbed herself in the eye about a _million_ times getting the stuff on. And then it hadn’t looked dark enough, so she’d had to redo it a few times, and ended up pulling out like a _hundred_ eyelashes. She was surprised that she even had any left after all the torture she went through to look beautiful so Adam would notice her. Honestly, sometimes it was like Jade was the only thing in this house he noticed.

“Oh hello, Adam,” Alisha said, as if it were quite by accident she was walking past the door at that instant. She swished her hair around and opened the door to let him in, still fluttering her eyelashes madly. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” she added, hoping he could tell how absolutely grown-up she was. “What a divine coincidence,” she added, just in case he still thought she’d been letting him in on purpose. Clearly, it was serendipity. Clearly, it was a _sign_ that they were meant to be together. It was so romantic Alisha half-forgot that it wasn’t true, and almost swooned.

“Hey, Alisha,” Adam said in an odd voice, probably so absolutely struck by her beauty he couldn’t sleep. “Um—could you do me a favor?”

This time Alisha did swoon. But only a little. Her knees went wobbly, and she practically fainted. Wait until she told Becky at school. She’d just _die_. Alisha already knew what Adam was going to ask. He was going to ask her to be his bride. Well—of course he wasn’t going to just profess his love _on the spot_. That would be silly. He’d want to make sure that she had feelings for him as well first. So he’d probably ask her to go steady with him, or go to the drive-in or something, before they declared their hearts and everything. Honestly, she was only twelve. There wasn’t any need to rush.

“Yes,” Alisha said breathily, fluttering her eyelashes with renewed fervor. “Oh, Adam, I would _love_ to! It would be divine.” She hoped he noticed how sophisticated she sounded. She’d been practicing saying divine for, like, hours. This girl Gretchen in her grade, who _always_ had a boyfriend, who was _always_ the best looking boy in the whole entire class, said divine a lot, and it made her sound so grown-up and sophisticated. It was probably the secret to her success. Alisha sort of hated Gretchen, though. So it wasn’t like she was trying to be _like_ her or anything.

Adam gave her another weird look. He must be smitten, Alisha thought, trying hard not to squeal. She couldn’t believe it. This was the moment. It was finally happening. They would tell their grandchildren this story someday. About how suddenly he’d seen her through different eyes. How suddenly he’d known. And how romantically and pure-heartedly he’d dared to ask—  
“’Um, great, thanks. It’s just—Daisy’s in the front yard, right? And I sort of looped her leash around a tree, but I don’t want her to get lonely, yeah? So it’d be awesome if you could just kind of check in on her. Unless you’re busy, which I totally understand.”

Alisha blinked several times in rapid succession. “Of—of course,” she stammered, and this time it was her voice that sounded weird. She tried her hardest to keep her chin from quivering. She had really thought—

As they passed each other in the doorway, Adam stopped her, placing a hand on her arm. Alisha’s heart began fluttering again. This was it this was it this was it!  
He lifted a gentle hand to her cheek and smiled tenderly. It was all Alisha could do to stay conscious at this point. Wait until Becky heard about _this_! “Hey, Leesh—you’ve got something right— _here_ ,” Adam said, wiping a finger across her cheek. It came back dotted with a flake of mascara. “There you go,” he said. “Thanks again, Alisha.”

Without a word, Alisha ran into the yard, buried her face in Daisy’s black curly fur, and started to cry.

 

 

Adam half-walked, half-ran up Jade’s stairs. He was at war with himself. On one hand, he very badly wanted to stay angry, not for this particular slight but for _every_ slight, real or imagined, he felt he’d suffered throughout the course of their long friendship. Because he never got angry, not with Jade, no matter how many times he was blown off, stood up, trod on, or ignored. It was because he was _Jade_. And what else was there, really, to say? Jade was Jade. The rest was inevitable.

After he’d got off the phone with Dave, Adam had made himself swear—to himself—that he would not, under any circumstances, go over to Jade’s now. Not out of anger, or spite, or even stubbornness (well, probably stubbornness), but because he’d told Dave he wouldn’t. And Adam Carson did not go back on his word. Often.

But then he’d figured, Daisy hadn’t had a walk all day. Except this morning, right when he’d got back from school, when he’d been trying to distract himself from the way his phone kept not ringing. And then again, around 2 pm, when he was convincing himself that it didn’t matter if one of his friends was dead and two others were ass hats, hanging out together without him—because he’d been convinced (rightly convinced!) even then that they were together—because he had a very pressing social agenda even without them: namely, hanging out with Daisy. While out on this second walk, unbeknownst to him, he had in fact missed three phone calls from two of his other friends, one of whom was a very cute blond named Tanner he was taking chemistry with. So obviously, Daisy, a lazy, hot, seven year-old black lab mix, was in dire need of some exercise, even if she had given him a rather baleful look when he’d picked up her leash yet again, as if it were still some tantalizing adventure. Anyone would tell you that labs always looked baleful.

And since it was walk three of the day, picking a new and exciting route was difficult. Could he help it if they just so happened to end up moseying onto Jade’s street? It’s not like he was really going back on his word. He was walking down the block and he heard yelling. He heard yelling, and Dave had been babbling about Jade and locked doors and crying and too many pills, and—

Yes. Fine. He’d gone back on his word. Concern had been eating him alive, and although walking Daisy had not initially been a pretense to get him to Jade’s without backing down, he realized it was about two minutes after he broke out into an all-out sprint in the direction of his friend’s home. One weird exchange with Alisha later—and that girl was getting stranger and stranger every day; he didn’t envy Dave her affections—and he was at once racing up the stairs and creeping up them haltingly. It was a unique method of travel that nearly resulted in a decapitation, quadriplegia, and the complete severance of his torso from his legs, respectively.

Adam bolted down the hall to Jade’s room and was prepared to beat down the door to get to his friend. And he would have, too, if Jade’s door had not already been open. Had Dave not already been inside. And had the only tears involved not been from hysterical laughing, which was well underway when Adam, panting, skidded into the room.  
Jade and Dave looked up at Adam, still howling with laughter, as if his unexpected arrival only made the joke funnier. “You cocksucking bastard,” he panted, glaring down at Dave. “You said—needed me—not crying—not _funny_!” Adam gasped for air. It had been a long time since he’d sprinted so much as a yard, let alone just shy of a mile. And—for nothing? “I made poor fucking Daze run!” he finally gasped, at a loss for what else to say.

But that only made it funnier.

 

 

End Notes:

So what do y'all think? Of this chapter, now added correctly; and also of Medicate. I'd love your thoughts!

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	6. 3 Weeks After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to the latest chapter of this sordid affair! *throat clearing* I don't own the characters, and none of this ever happened. Lately I've been watching Scrubs and listening to Sing the Sorrow. How's your life? If you've got any feedback or just want to chat, go ahead and fill in that box at the bottom of the page. Enjoy!

_I laughed the other day. Hard. With Dave. And, eventually, Adam. It was the funniest thing. Adam was so angry. You would’ve loved it._

_And—what I’m wondering, what I really want to know is—is that really such a bad thing?_

_I mean, should I be feeling guilty about that?_

_Now that you’re dead, doesn’t that mean I’m supposed to never laugh again or something?_

_So, I guess chalk that one up as another reason you should come back:_

_I feel guilty for laughing because you can’t laugh anymore._

_Come home, Smith._

_I miss you._

_— Jade_

 

 

3 WEEKS AFTER

 

This time, Hunter was prepared. Zombie hesitated in the entrance of the waiting room, seeing him, and Hunter made it easier. He gave Zombie his brightest grin and did a big, exaggerated wave. He even mouthed “Over here”, in case the whole gesture wasn’t blatant enough to be satirical before that moment.

Zombie bared his teeth, a relieved part-smile, and walked mincingly over to Hunter. He sat down too fast in the seat next to him, almost as if he were eager. It was such a rapid turnaround from the way Zombie had acted last time that Hunter was concerned. For instance, how did he know this was really Zombie, once again to his left? How could he be sure that it wasn’t a pod person? Pod people freaked him out. Hunter didn’t really see what the harm in pod people taking over the world really was, since they seemed to act enough like the people they were pretending to be to fool the regular non-pod folks, and that even if they did take everyone over they themselves wouldn’t be able to tell who was a pod and wasn’t, and would most likely go on acting the same, but that didn’t change the fact that they just flat gave him the creeps. For example, what if he was a pod person? There was really no way to tell, was there? Because it wasn’t like the pod people would want you to _know_ you were a pod person. He just didn’t like all the mind games. If and when Hunter Burgan (Not Easily Deterred)’s reality was altered, he liked to know about it.

Hunter gave Zombie a suspicious look. “Well, you are on my left…” he mused aloud. Zombie gave him that look that he usually got the first few times he ran into a new friend—that measured I-forgot-that-you-were-like-this-exactly look. People had the habit of glossing him over in their memory—underestimating him. Not a very attractive habit, but he was used to it. At least he always got the element of surprise. “…but that doesn’t mean you are who you say you are,” Hunter finished, largely for Zombie’s benefit, since he was the only one who wasn’t privy to the inner monologue. The inner monologue was essential to keeping up in a conversation with Hunter, the same way subtitles were essential to keeping up with movies that were filmed in Esperanto, translated into one of the Slavic languages, and you spoke formal Mandarin only.

“Who did I say I was, exactly?” Zombie asked. This was close to setting a new record for ‘maximum number of words said in a row by brainless flesh-eating monster’, which, as far as Hunter could tell, was a very competitive category.

It was also a stunning conversational coup.

“Oh, very clever,” Hunter said approvingly, reevaluating his sparring partner. “Well played, really very well played. I daresay _touché_.”

Zombie cunningly continued the ruse of confusion. Clearly, he was someone to be contended with. “I didn’t say I was anyone,” he said, playing at dumbfounded. Playing his hand close to the chest—Hunter could respect that in a man.

“No one said you were anyone,” Hunter countered.

“You said I was someone! Well—no—you said I said I was someone, but I wasn’t really them,” Zombie said, pulling a very convincing façade of fluster.

“Someone? I didn’t say you were _anyone_ ,” Hunter replied. Zombie was good. Better than he’d expected. This was getting tricky indeed. “No one said nothing about _someone_. You could be someone. No one knows for sure, but I’m not no one, am I? There’s no knowing what no one knows.”

Zombie gave Hunter a very squinty look. If Hunter didn’t know better, he’d describe it as the look of someone evaluating him, trying to gauge whether he was serious or playing. But Zombie was clearly a combatant himself. Zombie obviously thought he could pull one over on Hunter, who was becoming less and less certain that wasn’t god’s honest truth.

“Are you… I’m sorry, are you using ‘no one’ as a construct, or as a… a _specific person_?” Zombie asked haltingly, still squinting. “Because… I think that might be the source of confusion… I don’t know no one, I mean, I don’t know anyone who is _called_ no one, if that’s…” Zombie trailed off.

Hunter bowed his head reverently. _Anyone who is called no one_. He tried to mull it over in his head, but there was no counter for it, no feint or parry or block that would divert its honest blade. It was a mortal blow. Perhaps his opponent was truly Zombie; perhaps he was a pod person. There was no knowing now.

Knowing when he was beaten, Hunter was not afraid to bow out gracefully. (Neither was he frightened of bowing out gracelessly. But that hardly seemed to suit this particular occasion. He’d keep it in reserve, in case he needed it later.) “Very well,” he conceded gravely, though his eyes were alight with the happiness of finding a worthy opponent at last, just when he had given up hope. “You have bested me—this time! Next time, my formidable friend, you may not be so fortunate.”

Hunter glanced at the reception desk, but Patti was on a quick bathroom break. Words had not actually passed between them, but Hunter felt it was understood that he would hold down the fort until Patti returned. Really, he was honored that she felt she could trust him with such a critical responsibility. You might even say he was touched.

Seizing the opportunity—striking while the iron was hot—and abusing his responsibility all in the same fell swoop, Hunter fished another miniature baggie from his pocket and palmed it over to Jade. “It’s true that power corrupts,” he sighed, admittedly a little disappointed in himself for breaking Patti’s trust this way.

“And absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Jade completed the adage almost unconsciously, hesitating to take the bag. He was glancing around skittishly, perhaps nervous that he would be seen.

“Good god, man, take the drugs!” Hunter hissed, still feeling shaky from so much defeat in such a short amount of time. “Patti won’t piss forever, and I have on good faith that fish there—the tetra, see?—is working in cooperation with the feds. We’ve got to keep this under their radar, _do you understand_?”

Zombie gave him that look again, as if he wasn’t sure if he was unhinged or had a sense of humor.

“It’s a bit of both,” Hunter answered the unasked question, leaving Zombie looking only more perplexed. “Now take them!”

“What… are they?” Zombie asked slowly, still looking questioningly at the mole in the fish tank. “And don’t say ‘help,’” he added before Hunter could say ‘help’. “I want to know what they are.”

Hunter was beginning to get a little panicky, still holding the baggie and all, but it wouldn’t do to lose his composure in front of a new customer. They tended to spook easy. “Well, did you take the ones I gave you last time?” he asked, striving to sound collected.

“Yes,” Zombie hissed back urgently.

“And did they…?”

“Yes,” Zombie hissed again, eyes riveted on the spot Patti would reappear, whenever she chose to. She was lucky, Hunter thought privately, that the morgues were having a slow day. Currently he had his own business to conduct. If she thought he’d just drop everything to dash off and answer the phone to cover her ass—Hunter realized with a jolt how quickly he’d become resentful of his obligations. He hoped Patti would return before he caught himself feeling mutinous.

“So what else do you need to know?” Hunter asked. It was the first time he’d tried his suave voice out loud. In truth, it made him sound a little… squeaky.

Zombie’s eyes bulged as if they were going to pop out of his head. He kept sneaking glances down to where the baggie and its contents were cupped in Hunter’s palm, still extended as if left hanging for a handshake. “I need to know _exactly what they are_ ,” Zombie insisted, ears flushing pink, “and I need to know _now_.”

“All right, all right! Don’t wet your pants, there, Zombie,” Hunter caved. He was getting a little hysterical. That goddamn fish was staring again. “The pinks—those are a class of hypnotic sedatives—name of Sonata. Their wee yellow comrades—now those are good stuff, so I only gave you three—they’re the artists formerly known as benzodiazepines. We call them Klonopin. One of those will knock you out flat. They’re for anxiety.”

Zombie had the nerve to interrupt. “Like that’s what they’re actually prescribed for? Because I don’t have—”

Hunter interrupted right back. “Your own personal anxiety, right? Like when you personally are freaking the hell out, like you’re doing now. So: Klonopin: for when you’re anxious, but only like in real emergencies. So try not to have more than three real emergencies in the next seven days, because I didn’t want to give you enough to kill you. I’m extremely concerned about your personal safety—make sure you mention that to the fish, if he asks. Extremely concerned. And those round peach ones, I put three of them in this cocktail, those are—don’t freak out—technically classified as methamphetamines, but I swear they’re not as bad as they sound—”

“They’re _what_?” Zombie whispered shrilly.

“They’re for fun!” Hunter hissed back. The fish kept eyeing him. “For fun only. Or for, like, ADD. But you don’t have that. Dexedrine. Do _not_ mix them with the yellow ones. No matter _what_ you do.”

Zombie blanched. “They won’t—I mean, they won’t like kill me, will they?”

Hunter rolled his eyes. Honestly, some people didn’t know anything about anything. For a cunning kind of guy, Zombie was not very savvy. But then—he was new at this. He’d catch on. “Of course they won’t kill you, Mr. Chemistry Whiz. They’d just sort of cancel each other out. And what good does that do you, right? So anyway, I was thinking you might want some Demerol or something, because I mean you just seem like the kind of guy who might benefit from some serious checking out, if you know what I mean, but I ended up having less of those laying around than I thought I did, and then I thought you know, Demerol’s kind of a big gun, you know what I’m saying, like one of the kings, right? A lot to handle. And then I figured that I should see how you’re doing on the Sonata I _gave_ you before we leapt into anything heavier. Except in the end I couldn’t help myself so I tossed you a couple of Klonopin, which will make you feel like your heart is made of water, no fucking joke.”

Zombie just stared at him blankly. “I don’t know what any of what you just said—”

“Just take them, okay?” hissed Hunter urgently. At that moment, Patti crested on the horizon, frowning at Hunter, who, from her angle, was not peddling pills so much as aggressively going after a handshake.

“Excuse me, is he bothering you?” she asked Zombie, eyeing Hunter sternly.

There was a moment of silence. Hunter was on needles. He had thought Zombie was cool. He had thought Zombie was the kind of guy who could benefit from Hunter’s operation. Hell, he’d thought Zombie was some kind of Zen kung fu master of wits. Not a narc. Not a rat! Not a plant, a plant that had been working alongside the federal tetra from the start, all of it some kind of twisted waiting room drug bust, some sort of sting operation. _I trusted you, man_ , Hunter wanted to say. But he didn’t. He waited. He waited to see if Zombie would betray him. Patti narrowed her eyes.

“Uh—no. Not at all,” Zombie said at last, reaching out and accepting not only Hunter’s handshake but the bag of pills as well. “We were just, um, getting acquainted.” He directed his gaze at Hunter. “Hi,” he said, with a kind of forced cheerfulness. “I’m, um, Jade.”

“I’m Hunter,” Hunter said, although he had assumed Zombie already knew that, since he’d already told him. “Here—hold up—I’ve got a card.” He did have one; he’d had them made up earlier in the week. He’d been giving them to everyone who would take them ever since. Actually, he was running a little low. He fished one out of his wallet and handed it to Zombie, grinning proudly.

Patti, though still looking a little suspicious, went back to her seat behind her counter without further investigation. Hunter felt triumphant that he hadn’t answered her phone while she was gone, even though she’d counted on him to, even though it hadn’t rung. He was really sticking it to the man. Well, woman, actually. Patti was almost inarguably a woman. Her breasts were much larger than her moustache, after all.

“Thanks for being so cool, man,” Hunter murmured to Zombie out of the corner of his mouth. “I mean, usually, I’m—well, I’m a pretty cool guy, I mean, obviously. There’s no other explanation for the business cards. I mean, really, I’m very chill. I just kind of lost it for a minute there—I didn’t know if you were cool. But you’re cool, you’re cool, I’m sorry I ever doubted how cool you are.”

“Are you… is that… that was a thank you, right?” Zombie clarified.

Hunter nodded his head formally. “Zombie, my man—it was _eternal gratitude_. Oh, and you owe me twenty-five dollars. For the cocktail.” Hunter flashed a bright grin before adding, “ _Buddy_.”

 

 

Jade came home from his appointment with Daniel Harmon feeling hollowed out. Hunter hadn’t been waiting outside for him this time; if he’d wanted reassurance, he wasn’t getting any. Still, he’d swallowed one of the pills he’d paid for, no longer a mystery. Sonata, Hunter had said. Well, it wasn’t much like it sounded: music of triumph, crashing symphonies. Sonata was more like being drowned, very lovingly. Having dark cotton pressed to your eyes, your face, your whole body, and being lowered softly under.

Jade found that, where the part of him that should have minded ought to have been, there were only blurred out edges, and longing. Longing to cast off again; to cut the tethers and drift away into the mist, where everything was indistinct and muffled, and he didn’t feel anything.

Not feeling anything was more than a relief than usual today. Than usual—he flinched at thinking that. Was Smith being dead _usual_ now? Was that what that meant? But instead of real concern there was more of an idle curiosity, another thing that should worry him. Jade didn’t feel angry, particularly; or desperate, or frightened, or _anything_. He didn’t know how he felt about it—for obvious reasons—but he’d swallowed the pill, hadn’t he? No one had made him do that. Had he done it numbly, a robot, because it was in his hand? Or had he done it because feeling was starting to come back, because the memory of pain was becoming clearer, and as the fog lifted he began to see his brother’s foaming lips, tinged with blood?

Didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. What mattered was nothing: feeling nothing. Especially with Smith gone. Especially with Smith gone, and Adam not.

The best part about leaving home, for Jade, had been leaving Adam. Leaving his best friend. That deep settling sadness, twisted with relief, at the prospect of not having to see him again for months. Not having to hear his voice, or see his smile, or look into his eyes. The ache and the longing didn’t fade with distance, didn’t fade with time—but the constant reminder became less constant, stretched across paler memories, partially obscured with people he’d met at school. He couldn’t exorcise Adam, couldn’t escape the dreams or fading fantasies, but he’d been able to hide from it, hide for months at a time. Last year he’d even taken a class over winter break, just to stay away. The only reason he hadn’t done the same over summer was… well. It was because he’d _missed_ Adam. And Dave. And his family. And Smith.

But right now? Shielded in this—what had Hunter said? Hypnotic sedative?—shielded in this, he didn’t have to feel a thing. Not for his dead brother. Not for Adam. Not for anybody.

 

 

Every Saturday night presented its own unique challenges to Adam. It had been, ever since the Carsons had gotten cable, a staple of his friendship with Jade. That was because Saturday night was horror night on channel 37. Once a week, at 8 o’clock, a horror film would play. B-movies—old movies—new movies—alien movies—funny movies—monster movies—foreign movies—or, their favorite, zombie movies. Some weeks, they would stay up all night, each of them too afraid to be awake, alone, in an empty house; other weeks, they’d be in hysterics by the end of the film, chocolate syrup blood and fake fangs that gave the actors lisps and really, really unnecessary dramatic music. “Don’t leave the front door unlocked!” Jade would yelp, sometimes even clinging to Adam’s arm when he was startled. “No, turn on the light! You moron! Close the blinds! _Who the fuck cares what that noise in the basement was, don’t go check_!”

It was, by and far, the best night of Adam’s week.  
And the worst. The very worst.

Since Smith had—well—they hadn’t observed Horror Night. But _The Crazies_ was on tonight, and Dave just didn’t care about early Romero films the same way Adam did, for all that he took a spectator’s pleasure in them. Adam had really been hoping that he’d be able to watch this one with his best friend. No disrespect meant to Smith. Not that he was trying to get on with his life and live normally again. Just that… it was selfish, but he’d never been so lonely. Dave was a clusterfuck, impossible to be around, didn’t know and couldn’t control what he was feeling. Jade was a shell of himself; when you looked in his eyes you expected an echo. And Adam himself… hell, he was temperamental, and stubborn, and mired in more denial than usual. Adam felt that they, or at least he, _needed_ this.

Still, as back-up, he’d made tentative plans with Tanner-from-chemistry for tonight. They were possibly, maybe, depending on each other’s schedules, going to watch the movie together. Easy to back out of, basically; everything a back-up plan should be. Adam didn’t necessarily want the pain and loss he felt to go away, feeling as if he would lose something of Smith with it, but he knew that he couldn’t live in perpetual stagnation either. It would tear him apart. Adam didn’t want to get over Jade either. But maybe his ridiculousness had gone on long enough. Maybe there should be more to his life than the occasional predictable-but-startling moment in a Saturday night horror flick that was actually scary, when Jade grabbed his arm instead of a pillow and swore out loud, and Adam felt like he could fly. Jade was… Jade was his best friend. Jade would always be his best friend, even when there wasn’t much Jade left. Even when Jade went away to school and seemed to leave him behind forever. Even when they’d only hung out, excepting Horror Night, once or twice the whole summer, and Dave and Smith had been with them both times. Even when he hadn’t seen much of his best friend at all before the storm, and saw even less after.

For the first time, Adam was willing to consider that making himself happy, even a little bit happy, in a medium that was separate from Jade, was not treachery. It was not betrayal. It was not even being a bad friend, or letting anyone down. It was simply making himself happy, just a little bit happy, in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with Jade.

As it was, it was rounding on seven o’clock, and no word from Jade. Well—he’d already taken Daisy on two inconspicuous walk past his friend’s home. It was time to make the call.

 

 

“Hello?” Alisha answered the phone brightly. Had to sound happy at all times, she reasoned. Never knew who might be calling. Might be one of her friends—and it just wouldn’t do if they had uncomfortable questions.

“Hey, Leesh,” Adam’s voice came. He sounded relieved to have reached her. She bit her lip. Well this was just _fabulous_. He was crawling back already. Didn’t he know—wouldn’t boys ever learn—that she wasn’t going to just _forgive_ him? Alisha was not _about_ to let Adam just march back into her life, not after what he did to her—! “I’m calling for your brother.”

Alisha stiffened at Adam’s poor choice of words. Firstly, the _least_ he could do was beg for her forgiveness. Honestly. Secondly, could he be any vaguer? “For your _information_ ,” Alisha replied icily, “I have th—”

Three brothers, she’d been about to say. For your information, I have three brothers, so could you please be a little more specific to avoid confusion, and also I’m _not_ their receptionist, thank you very much.  
Three brothers. Alisha felt something hot stinging at her eyes, her throat tightening.

“Two brothers, I mean,” she whispered. _Do not cry_ , she instructed herself fiercely. It was just… Adam knew. She couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened, like she did at school. She couldn’t pretend that her older brother was fine. She could _tell_ Adam, because Adam already knew. She could say _two brothers_ and he wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t need to know, why. For some reason that made her want to cry more than anything—just that Adam, that someone, _knew_. Maybe, because he already knew, she could tell him. Maybe, once she told Adam, it would be easier to tell everyone—anyone—else.

“Just two brothers.” Under normal circumstances, Alisha would try to pull herself together. Say something like, And I don’t expect you’re calling for Gibs, are you?, and then sniff haughtily so he’d know she was still mad. But that mattered a whole lot less under the sudden crushing wave of hurt she felt. Of grief. Of loss.

“Leesh…” Adam said softly, not even sounding like he’d rather be talking to someone else. If she hadn’t been putting all of her energy into not bursting into tears, she’d be flattered. “I’m so sorry.”

Well, that was it. There was no stopping it now. Alisha broke out into big, hiccupy sobs, eyes and nose letting loose with their respective fluids. She would never be able to look Adam in the eye again. “I h-haven’t told,” Alisha wailed into the phone. “Haven’t told a-anyone. Don’t w-want them to—to know that—”

And then she was crying too hard to speak. Adam’s voice came through the phone, sounding far away, but somehow close enough. “Oh, Leesha, I know,” he murmured. “Sweetheart… I know. I haven’t told anyone at school either. I… I could barely even tell my own mother. I didn’t know the words… I didn’t know… I couldn’t. I couldn’t say it. It was like I opened my mouth but there was nothing there, like I was all empty, and I was being pulled underwater, dragged down into…” Adam trailed off, perhaps realizing that drowning analogies were not the best approach in this situation.

“No one talks about him,” Alisha whispered, when some of the louder sobs had subsided. “M-Mom doesn’t—doesn’t talk about, doesn’t say, I mean it’s like she’s not even really—and Dad, he still walks around whistling like everything’s okay… I feel like it’s just me, like I’m the only one…” Alisha opened and closed her mouth helplessly. “I don’t know what it’s like,” she finally whimpered. “It’s like I’m almost jealous of him, because he’s the one that got to die, and we’re the ones who have to stay alive and miss him.”

There was a weighted silence over the line. “If… wherever he is, if he… I know he’d miss you too,” Adam finally said, as if searching very hard for the appropriate words.

Alisha nodded, as though Adam could hear, and let out a final sniffle. “Thank you,” she said tearfully. “I… I guess I forgive you,” Alisha added, before hanging up the phone.

 

 

Adam stared dully at the handset for a moment. Well, that took care of that, didn’t it? A draining conversation with Jade’s half-sister—during which Adam, flustered, had _not_ known what to do with his hands—and now he was back to square one. Back to square one, that is, if square one involved not getting through to Jade, with _The Crazies_ starting in just under an hour, and not one single option.

Well—that wasn’t true. There was a single option.

Adam’s fingers hesitated over the keypad, but only for a moment.

He called Tanner.

 

 

To his credit, Tanner accepted Adam’s invitation gracefully, and showed up not twenty minutes later, mild grin failing to conceal how happy he was to be there. They made themselves comfortable in the den, settling on opposite ends of the couch. Adam made popcorn during the first commercial and, ever a charming host, kept Tanner’s glass of iced tea filled.

The nice thing about watching a movie with the cute boy from your chemistry class, Adam reasoned, was that you didn’t have to talk to him. The first commercial break, the most awkward, Adam spent making popcorn; the others after that could be filled with loud, mindless chewing or, if they were feeling brave, comments about the movie. Once or twice, they even laughed. And then, close to the end of the film, during a part that wasn’t even that scary, Tanner reached over, seized Adam’s hand, and squeezed it.

Adam was startled by the contact, and immediately conflicted. But at the same time—it was warm. It was nice. It had been a long time since someone had _wanted_ to touch him.

He didn’t take his hand away.

 

 

End Notes:

Hunter's great, isn't he?

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	7. 23 Days After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All that patient waiting, and it's a short one...
> 
> You'll like it, though, if you give it a chance. Dave and Adam are adorable together. I somewhat forgot about this story in all the flash and bang of life lately--and on that note, I'd like to make an official welcome to Abby Page, my brand-new niece.
> 
> I don't own the boys; this did not occur. Please let me know what you think!

  
_I missed movie night with Adam again this week. You used to come for the good ones, remember? It was always so much fun. And when I was away at school, you’d go over there every Saturday, just so Adam wouldn’t have to watch them alone. Because that would be pathetic. And I’m sure you had better things you could’ve done on Saturday nights. You always had friends lining up, because they know what I’m just starting to realize: spending time with you is one hell of a privilege. Like a gift._  
  
 _I feel guilty for not going to Adam’s. I haven’t been much of a friend since you… Well. Since. And I’ve got the best excuse I’ll probably ever have for that, but… being alone isn’t exactly the best thing. I guess I could have called him. It’s pretty retarded that I’m offended that_ he _didn’t call_ me _when I didn’t even call him, right? But I can’t help it. I wish I could help what I felt._  
  
 _Well—maybe I can’t. The little pinks can._  
  
 _I shouldn’t feel too bad. I’m sure he watched it on his own, or with Dave. He wouldn’t have missed a Romero, even one he’s seen before. The world will be ending, and Adam will still be on his couch on Saturday night, watching crappy horror movies. So there he is, at the end of time—and I wonder, am I still sitting next to him?_  
  
 _Do I want to be?_  
  
 _And if I do, if that is where I want to be, why aren’t I? I mean—why haven’t I been there? You can’t avoid the people you love and expect them to keep liking you. Not forever._  
  
 _Today’s reason you should come home:_  
  
 _It’s quite possible I’m becoming a drug addict. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?_  
  
 _I take another pill every time I start to feel again. Don’t want to feel. Don’t want all my memories of you rushing in at once. I’ll take them one at a time, picked out of a fog, a distant blur. Sampling them, as it were. That I can handle. But the weight of all of it at once—I’d cave in. I’d collapse. I’d fall apart._  
  
 _I_ am _falling apart._  
  
 _I miss you, you stupid ass._  
  
 _— Jade_

 

23 DAYS AFTER

 

“How was _The Crazies_?” Jade asked, hoping he sounded casual. Adam looked up from the book he was squinting at, topmost on a towering stack. Dave, spread out with an equally impressive amount of homework at his kitchen table, looked up too.

“It was okay,” Adam said, shrugging. “Better the second time around, I think.”

“I didn’t miss it again, did I?” Dave asked, sounding dismayed. “I told you I wanted to see it next time it was on!” Dave was a late convert to the George Romero cult. He still hadn’t seen most of the earlier films. He generally preferred vampires to zombies, but Jade and Adam had been wearing him down.

Adam’s cheeks colored. “Sorry,” he mumbled to Dave. “It was on a few nights ago.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Dave cried. He seemed genuinely upset that he’d missed it. Movie night had become a lot less exclusive after Jade left for Berkeley. From that point on, walk-ins were welcome on Horror Night, because it wasn’t a tradition or a best-friends thing anymore. Without Jade, it was just Adam giving himself nightmares and eating too much popcorn.

“He didn’t call me either,” Jade said, regretting the words as soon as they left his lips. Damn it—he’d sounded passive-aggressive, downright catty. Like Adam’s nagging wife.

Adam looked affronted. They had, after all, both ganged up on him while he puzzled over an advanced chem worksheet. It was not the best time for him. “One: neither one of you called me, either. Two: _it’s always Saturday night_ , and I told you about it last week.” He shifted his gaze from Dave to Jade. “And three: I _did_ call you.”

Jade winced, remembering too late the message Alisha had given him that night.

Both Dave and Jade looked down, not wanting to meet Adam’s eyes. “Sorry,” they said at the same time, which made Adam laugh, making things okay again.

“At least that one wasn’t too scary, right?” Jade asked meekly, trying for a truce. “I mean, I don’t remember being too freaked out by it. And you already knew the ending, so it wasn’t bad to watch alone.”

Adam looked up from his chemistry book again, this time looking mildly startled. “Oh. Well, um, I didn’t watch it alone.”

Jade ran the equation through his head again. Dave—not there. Himself—not there. Smith—not anywhere. “Daisy doesn’t count,” he admonished, solving the problem.

“Erm—well—yeah. I wasn’t, um, counting Daze,” Adam said awkwardly, oblivious to Jade’s spinning head.

Dave looked as delighted as anyone writing an essay about the factors culminating in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s can. “Adam,” he said seriously, fighting to keep the glee out of his voice, “do you have _other friends_?”

Adam scowled good-naturedly at his friend. “That,” he said flatly, “is _not_ the way to get me to tell you about my life. In fact, I think I’d be much more cooperative in general if you didn’t always start by insulting me.”

“Anyone we know?” Jade asked, about a minute later than would have been appropriate. His voice was oddly strangled. Adam gave him a questioning look, probably because of the delay, or his voice sounding like he’d been using it as a can opener recently, but answered nonetheless.

“Nah, he has an apartment in the city. Didn’t even go to high school around here,” Adam told him. “His name’s Tanner. We—um—he’s in my chemistry class, actually.”

Dave batted his eyelashes joyfully. “Adam,” he teased, fighting to keep a straight face, “do you have a _boyfriend_?”

Adam frowned and got to his feet abruptly. “What? No. I—no. Listen, I have to go—go get something. I’ll be, um, back.”

Adam left the room quickly, leaving an uncomfortable silence in his wake. Dave returned to his essay. “So… Adam never struck me as a homophobe…” Jade said finally.

Dave murmured a response without looking up. “What? Oh. I think I just… embarrassed him. I think he’s like… the opposite of homophobic, right? Sort of… I don’t know… likes everyone.”

Jade had the distinct feeling that Dave was not telling the whole truth, but he didn’t see what there was about that statement that could be lied about, so he wrestled with the uneasiness in his gut and tried to act normal. Sonata must be wearing off, he thought. He’d started referring to the pills, at least to himself, by their proper name. They were starting to feel like a friend of his.

“So, do you guys want to hang out or something?” he asked, following a significant pause.

“Hmm?” Dave said, finally tearing himself away from his essay. “Can’t, man. We’re both of us utterly swamped in homework. It’s almost midterms.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll just…” Jade didn’t finish his sentence. Dave, elbow-deep in a history of farm equipment, didn’t seem to notice.

Jade bit his bottom lip, feeling left out. He wondered how much work he’d have if he was back at Berkeley. An ungodly amount, probably. But he didn’t think he’d be too stressed about it. No, Jade found it difficult to care about even hypothetical homework just then. After all, what was the point? Bust your ass on math homework so you can die? Because in the end, that was all anyone did. Die. Seeing that they were all doomed, that their lives were actually anytime-anywhere waivers for death, he couldn’t understand why _anyone_ would care about all their homework. Why anyone would care about anything at all. It was all going to end anyway, wasn’t it? Better not to get too attached.

Jade abruptly excused himself into the kitchen for a glass of water. Yes, it was definitely time for another Sonata. All these thoughts—they were just fucking obnoxious, is what they were. He didn’t want them. Let someone else have them. Let him just—rest. Just for a little while.

 

 

Adam crouched just inside his bedroom door, elbows on knees, head in hands, panicking. What in _hell_ had possessed Dave to say that? Why the _fuck_ had he—  
Adam tried to steady his breathing, think rationally. Okay. Okay. There was an obvious answer here. An obvious solution. Obviously—obviously—oh, fuck—obviously, Dave hated him. That had to be it. There was _absolutely no good reason that his supposed friend would do that to him otherwise_.

Okay. He tried to reason. Okay. Well, just, all right then. Jade would never—obviously Dave was joking—Jade would have no reason to think that Dave was doing anything but joking—but Jade might have questions, right? With the way that Dave made a _joke_ and then Adam just booked it? What if he thought—he was going to think—and he was going to _ask Dave if_ —

Adam leapt to his feet so quickly that he was momentarily blinded by the head rush. Okay okay okay okay. This didn’t have to be a disaster. If he just got downstairs before Dave opened his stupid nemesis mouth—

Adam bounded down the stairs, taking them five at a time and damn near crippling himself for life on at least two occasions. Stairs were not his best thing lately. He raced into the dining room, where Dave was immersed in his schoolwork. To his great relief, Jade was nowhere to be seen. That meant that Dave hadn’t said anything.

Unless it meant that Dave had said everything and Jade, disgusted and possibly frightened, had fled the premises.

Well, that was it, then. He’d have to kill Dave. He was a pretty small kid, wasn’t he? Adam knew already that he could take him. After that, it was the simple matter of hiding the body. Shouldn’t be too difficult. God knew he’d seen enough horror movies to have a few creative ideas about what to do with bothersome corpses. Obviously he’d have to flee the country regardless, if Dave had told Jade everything, so it wasn’t like moving to Mexico and trying to get by on three years of high school Spanish classes wasn’t already on the itinerary.

“Well,” Adam asked, glowering at Dave, “where would you like to be buried?”

Dave looked up slowly, as though he was seriously considering it. “You know, that whole open-casket thing got me thinking, I don’t want to be trapped in a box forever. I mean, puree me into a health shake or use me as fertilizer, just don’t lock me up in some rot-proof varnished Cadillac-for-corpses, yeah? So probably I’d like to be cremated.” Dave paused thoughtfully. “How come?”

Adam advanced on his friend, not feeling even a little bit regretful. “Well, because I’m going to kill you,” he said.

Dave looked mildly alarmed. “Oh, right. And when did you become a lunatic again? I always get the date mixed up, see—”

Adam had not stopped advanced. Dave scrabbled to his feet, dumping his lapful of books and papers onto the tabletop with a resounding thud, and started edging around the table, away from Adam.

“Oh, I think it might have been right around when you _told Jade that Tanner was my boyfriend_ ,” Adam growled. “Which he’s not,” he felt necessary to add hurriedly, glaring at Dave.

Dave grinned, more comfortable now that there was a table-length between him and Adam. “Yeah, thought that might be it,” he conceded. “Right, so, how about we just calm down a little bit, ‘kay? Because obviously—” Dave let out a little shriek, followed by a laugh, as Adam lunged. The younger boy trotted away, keeping the table between him and Adam, not letting his would-be executioner gain any ground. “ _Obviously_ it was a joke—” Dave darted away as Adam lunged again—“and the only reason he _might_ have made anything of it is because _you_ streaked out of the room like you had a violent bowel condition—” Dave grinned tauntingly at Adam, who had made no headway and was considering vaulting over the table to reach his friend. Currently he was not convinced he’d miss the light fixture, and he very much doubted a concussion would help matters any. “And you’re not making much of a case for plausible deniability—” He began baiting Adam deliberately, feinting in one direction and then the other—“all of which leads _me_ to believe that I was _right_!” Dave crowed triumphantly, breaking into an all-out run to match Adam’s increasing pace. “Adam looooves Tanner!” Dave sang out, laughing madly. “Adam lov—”

Dave was cut off abruptly as four things happened very quickly. A chair leg, jostled out of place from the last circuit of the table, stuck out and tripped him; he fell on his face; Adam, not actually prepared to catch his quarry, tripped over Dave and fell on top of him with an undignified grunt; and just as they both gave up laughing, Dave trying to catch Adam’s wrists to stop them slapping, Jade said quietly from the doorway,

“You could have just told me, Adam. I mean—it’s totally—it’s, um, cool, yeah? I just—I mean, I don’t care about—obviously this guy is important to you, and I—um, totally support that, and, so, uh, when can I meet him?”

 

 

Adam felt sick. All this time—all this time, and Jade was _okay with it_? All this time and Jade _didn’t care_ that he—well—liked boys? It wasn’t just boys, granted. Adam thought a lot of girls were very pretty too. There were some he wouldn’t even mind dating. It was just—Jade was kind of like the sun. Stare at it too long, and everything else in the whole world is just dark blobs. Jade was like being perpetually hungover; the only cure was to start drinking again. Jade was like a thousand bad analogies, none of which could capture the real essence of the man, which was _he didn’t even fucking care that Adam liked guys_. After all this time!

The lack of personal attack was like a personal attack.  
Honestly—for the sake of Jesus bloody Christ—hadn’t Adam been obsessed with fear for years now? Do I tell my best friend, do I lie to my best friend? Will he hate me will he hate me will he reject me will he hate me should I tell him should I take it to my grave? It had been a _constant fucking uproar_ in his head, in his _life_ , and it turned out that Jade didn’t even _fucking_ care.

That bastard.

Adam had compromised, back in high school, when he’d still been torn. He’d not exactly denied it when Dave put two and two together (Adam was lying to himself. He’d denied it outright and had a screaming fight with Dave about how untrue the truth was.), and had a conniption when Dave told Smith, and felt better for a few of his friends knowing—knowing, and not liking him less. Granted, Smith had been insufferable, Adam remembered wistfully. He’d gladly suffer him now. He’d put on a falsetto squeal and shriek “Omigod, you two just _have to_ get married, and then we’ll be, like, totally brothers!” in a fairly dead-on impression of his sister’s inflection. For as furious and embarrassed as it always made Adam, he had to concede, Smith with his hands clasped together under his chin and swooning was a sight that never ceased to be funny.

But apparently it had all been pointless. Apparently he should have just told his best friend outright that oh, by the way, not to be awkward or anything, but I think you’re extremely attractive in a sexual way. Also, I love you.

Adam laughed aloud, bitterly. Oh, definitely. No big deal or anything. Yeah, Jade would’ve been _fine_ with that.

He could just stab himself. Really, if he could just eviscerate himself right now, Adam felt that all his problems would go away. It would really, _really_ , make everything easier.

Adam took a deep, steadying breath. Well, okay. Okay okay okay. It was becoming his new mantra. Jade knew, then, that he sort of sometimes had feelings for guys. Jade knew, Adam knew, and Tanner—if the hand-holding was any indication—knew too. So all the involved parties at least had all the information. Except that now he was supposed to be dating Tanner. Yeah, whose fucking brilliant plan had _that_ been? Oh, right: his good buddy Dave. Adam ground his teeth unconsciously. So what did he do?

Tanner was cute. Tanner was sweet. Tanner was an excellent lab partner with a good sense of humor who liked horror movies and the correct type of music. Tanner was outgoing and tan with short blond hair and Buddy Holly glasses. He liked to read, and had some of the most perfect penmanship Adam had ever seen. You could line up every one of their lab reports, and all of the Ts would be identical. Every 5 Tanner had ever written was perfect, and the diagrams he freehanded were clear, crisp lines. Tanner wanted to be an architect. Tanner was, all around, the kind of guy Adam liked to spend time with.

Jade was Jade.

Adam was presented with three options. One, the most attractive, was to convince Tanner to pretend to date him (preferably without hurting his feelings) and introducing him to Jade; then, a few weeks later, staging a break-up, and resuming asexuality. Another, almost as appealing for all that it made Adam’s insides wrench, was to convince Tanner to _actually_ date him. The last, absolutely ludicrous, was to tell Jade the truth: no, Tanner is not my boyfriend, Dave was teasing me, it’s you that I have feelings for.

Adam untangled his legs from Dave’s, whose nose was bright red and painful-looking where he’d fallen on it, and tried to muster some dignity as he straightened his rumpled t-shirt. He looked his best friend square in the eye and said, “Wednesday. You can meet him Wednesday.”

He held Jade’s clear amber gaze, watching his friend recede inside himself, convinced he had done the right thing, which would always, always, be wrong.  
q95;

 

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	8. 25 Days After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In honor of Crash Love, I bring you a charming piece of fiction that is entirely made up and not real and concerning people that I certainly do not own! Let me know what you think--of the chapter and the album and life, the universe, and everything.
> 
> Enjoy, darlings.
> 
> (Oh, and P.S., I understand that a lot of you aren't going to be thrilled about what I'm doing to Jade, judging by how pissed my beta was. But bear with me, 'kay? I haven't let you down yet, have I?)

  
_You are not going to_ believe _this. As soon as he told me, I knew I had to tell you. Even through the lovely haze of prescription addiction, there was this urgency, this feeling of_ just wait until Smith hears this _. And, like I said—you ~~aren’t going to~~ wouldn’t have believed it.  
_

 _Okay. Well, I’m not really sure on the details or anything, but I’m pretty reasonably sure that the gist of it is that Adam is… well, I mean,_ Adam _is… Now that it comes to saying it, I mean, even writing it, it’s like my hand is adverse to forming the words. It’s just a little insane. Okay. The thing is. Adam,_ my _Adam, my best-friend-for-life_ Adam _, is… gay.  
_

 _Or at least I think he is. I’m not totally sure. But he definitely has a boyfriend. So that’s sort of an indication, right? And the thing is, Smith… I have to_ meet _the guy. I hate him already.  
_

_Can you believe it? I mean, after all this time? And Adam has a proclivity towards guys, or at least this one guy?  
_

_~~And I always wanted  
~~ _

_~~I mean, I could have  
~~ _

_~~How long have I~~   
_

_And I never knew.  
_

_Blows your mind, doesn’t it?  
_

_Today’s reason you should come home is: there’s some things you just can’t say to the dead, Smith. Things like: turns out my best friend is gay. ~~Turns out that all along I could have~~  
_

_And it’s shit like this I need you for, Smith. Not a handful of fucking Sonata. When you’re settling for a sonata you can fit in your pocket, you know there’s better out there. How depressing is that? You know that somewhere out in the world there’s real, full-sized sonatas—huge ones, so big and so loud and so amazing that you can’t even fit them in a regular-sized_ room _with regular height ceilings. Some are so big that you can’t even keep them indoors, and have to shrink them down to ant-sized notes on a page to be able to feed them through an instrument, to be able to capture that kind of sound, that kind of feeling. And even_ knowing _that, even knowing that there are these awesome orgasmic life-changing explosions of beauty and life and love out there somewhere, you’re stuck with the kind that fits in your pocket. And that it’s the best you’re going to get. Because your brother is dead. Because your best friend is dating some asshole named Tanner, and they’re going to get married and adopt babies and die from AIDS, and all I’ve got is a sonata so pathetic, so tiny, so miniscule, that I can fit it in my goddamn_ pocket.

_— Jade_

 

 

25 DAYS AFTER

 

Jade checked his watch anxiously. Two hours and thirty minutes until he was meant to go to Adam’s, where this Tanner character was. He wasn’t sure what kind of impression he wanted to make. Did he want to seem like a laid-back, fun kind of guy? Intense and intimidating? Downright rude? Did he want Tanner to loathe him, fear him, like him? Which would be the most cruel? He couldn’t decide.

At the root of the problem was Adam. If he could make up his mind about Adam, maybe he could make up his mind about Tanner.

What Jade needed was a second opinion. Irreverent and well-meaning: his brother’s opinion. Well. Good luck with that one.

What he did instead was fish out Hunter’s business card and tentatively dial the number.

After the first few rings, someone not entirely unfamiliar, picked up. “Hunter Burgan, private eye,” the voice said.

Jade’s mouth was suddenly dry. He didn’t know what to say. He cleared his throat and said, “Um, hi. This is Jade, er, Puget. We met in the waiting room at—”

“Jade Rrr-Puget? I’m afraid I don’t know that name,” Hunter said, sounding polite but cold. “If this is another prank call—”

Jade racked his brain, trying to remember what it was that Hunter had kept calling him in the waiting room. Something vaguely derogatory… that, for the life of him, Jade hadn’t been able to puzzle out… it had involved rotting flesh…

“That’s it!” Jade said aloud. “It’s Zombie. Hi, it’s Zombie.”

“Oh, Zomms, my man!” Hunter crowed cheerily. Jade shook his head in silent amazement. Some people. “Why didn’t you just say it was you?”

“I thought I had,” Jade said warily, remembering the last conversation they’d had about his identity, “but clearly I’d mistaken the name.”

Luckily, Hunter accepted that statement without pause. Jade couldn’t help but be bewildered by him. “You’re using my business card, then,” he said proudly. “What do you think of them? Beauties, am I right?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s handy,” Jade said nervously. “I—er—it’s the green embossment especially, I think, that brings out the—er—seriousness of the whole thing. Even, you might say, intimidating… like the ‘Not Easily Deterred’ bit is some kind of unspoken threat… I bet anyone who reads it stops and thinks, I don’t want to fuck with that guy, he’s not easily deterred.”

Hunter sounded cross. “Intimidating? You find a business card intimidating? I think you’re reading into this a little deeply, Zombie. Maybe you need more therapy than you let on, if you get my drift.”

Jade could not understand why Hunter was acting like _he_ was the weird one anymore than he could comprehend how and when he’d picked up the nickname “Zombie”. If Dave ever heard it, he may as well change his name entirely, because that would be the end of things. Smith would have loved it.

Jade tuned back in to realize that Hunter was still chattering. “Hoped you weren’t exceeding your dosage, wouldn’t want you to get in too deep, wouldn’t want you to turn into—well—a zombie, am I right? But if you were, for a nominal fee—convenience charge, if you will—I’d be more than happy to make a house call. So what will it be, eh, Zomms? Drugs? Counsel? Or do you need to call upon my masterful detection skill? Because I didn’t think that ‘detecting’ was on the first printing of my cards. Hmm…” Hunter trailed off thoughtfully.

“Actually, I needed… um… well, I guess advice.”

Hunter didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah? What sort? Because I regret to inform you I’m no longer permitted to provide legal counsel. Legitimacy is no walk in the park, no matter what our _fine_ civil servants seem to think.”

Jade was, as usual, taken aback, but he was getting better at talking to Hunter. He didn’t let it show. “It’s about… making a first impression on someone,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

“Do you mean like party planning?” Hunter asked, very seriously. “Because we at Hunter Burgan Industries plan one _hell_ of a party.”

“More like… person planning,” Jade said vaguely.

If possible, Hunter’s voice became even more serious, sounding not unlike Dr. Frankenstein might have on the night he completed his masterpiece. “Are you—I mean, you couldn’t be—are you giving me permission to clone you? Because I am so—”

“No, no, I don’t want you to clone me,” Jade cut him off before things could get out of hand. “I’m about to meet this guy who I probably already hate for the first time, and I’m just not sure how I should come off.”

If Hunter was disappointed, he was very professional about showing it. “Do you own any firearms?” he asked instead, opening a new line of questioning that Jade was afraid might be relevant.

“No…” he said carefully.

“Would you like to borrow one?” Hunter asked.

Jade contemplated hanging up the phone.

“No, listen,” Hunter went on. “If you want him to be intimidated, it’s done. If you want him to think you’re badass, it’s done. If you want him to think you’re unstable, it’s done. All you need is to flash a little bit of gun at him, and—”

“Thank you for your help,” Jade sighed, giving up, “but I think I can handle this one on my own.”

“Zombie, do you understand the term ‘billable hours’?” Hunter asked, sounding impatient.

“Um, yeah,” Jade said. “I thought you weren’t sanctioned for legal counsel?”

Hunter cleared his throat. “The point is, so far the only thing we’ve accomplished is that you want legal counsel and that I’d be willing to provide it, but it would have to be under the table, because the feds are already on my ass. I showed you Agent Neon, remember?”

“Um… the fish?” Jade guessed.

“Yes. The fish. I’m telling you, they have people everywhere. But what I’m saying, Zomms, is that you’re going to be billed for this call, right? So you might as well get something out of it,” Hunter explained.

“Hunter? I’m not paying you for this call,” Jade said.

“But it’s in the terms of service! Right on the back of my card!”

“The only thing on the back of this card is a half-finished game of Hangman,” Jade corrected. “And even if there _were_ terms of service listed on this card—and again, there aren’t—I would not be paying you for this phone call.”

Hunter was silent for a moment. “Must’ve been the second printing,” he mumbled before conceding, “Well—fine. But if I waive the surcharge for this conversation, you’re going to have to do something for me.”

“Yeah? We’ll see,” Jade said, playing tough, surprised at how well Hunter responded to being stiff-armed. He’d seemed like he’d fight it.

“My demands are—”

“I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Jade interrupted, perhaps getting a little too carried away trying on the shockingly effective tough-guy role.

“Jesus, there’s no reasoning with some people,” Hunter muttered, as if to himself. “Fine. I would _like_ you to let me help you. _Please_.”

“What makes you think I need your help?” Jade asked gruffly, definitely carried away.

“Um, other than that you called me?” Hunter asked, sounding as if he was concerned for Jade’s mental well-being. “That you called me. So shut up. I’ll stop being difficult if you will.”

Jade agreed, and was shocked to, from that point on, have a conversation that was almost entirely normal—or as normal as a conversation with a pill-peddling stranger about how to act towards your best friend’s new boyfriend can ever be.

And at the end of it, they reached what they felt to be the simplest solution: Klonopin.

 

 

Adam wrung his hands nervously, immediately feeling like a housewife in an old film. Worse, Tanner noticed, arching a brow. Adam made a mental note to ban the gesture from his repertoire immediately.

He hadn’t been able to decide. Ask Tanner to lie for him and ruin all chances he might have with him, or come on to him with commitment so abruptly that neither plausible outcome was desirable: not the one where Tanner freaked any more than the one where Tanner _was_ a freak. Mired at this crossroads, Adam had stopped, looked around, and decided it was a pretty nice crossroads. Blue sky—bright sunlight—lush field of wildflowers to the right—happy little stream to the left. Really the sort of spot you could make yourself comfortable in. That, and both paths ahead greatly resembled the yawning, fiery gates to hell.

Adam didn’t have much of a plan, but if he did, it would resemble a poorly folded pair of hole-ridden socks, or perhaps a sinking ship. It was this:

Act normal, or as normal as he was able. Introduce Tanner to Jade and Dave. Pray that the word ‘boyfriend’ didn’t leave anyone’s lips.

Currently, he and Tanner were sitting on Adam’s front porch, having what could well have been a very stimulating conversation about what was lacking in modern American film. Adam couldn’t have told you, because try as he might, listening was just not possible. He wasn’t distracted by Tanner’s bottomless blue eyes, or the way his cheeks kept flushing pinker and pinker with his passion for the subject; no, he was caught up in an endless pit of despair, where the upcoming situation spiraled out of control into an increasingly subpar episode of _Three’s Company_. The jokes weren’t even funny. Well—okay—for a hellish vision, Adam had to concede it was a pretty typical episode of _Three’s Company_.

Tanner was now, with great enthusiasm, telling Adam about the foreign film that was the pretense behind the meet and greet tonight. Tanner raved about it as only an extreme hobbyist can. Adam couldn’t even half-listen; he was too busy envisioning all the things that were going to go wrong tonight, and all the ways his world was going to come crashing down around him.

It started sooner than he’d expected. Tanner fell silent abruptly, giving Adam a hard look. “Adam?” he asked patiently. “Did you hear what I said about _Un Deux Trois Soleil_?”

“Um, yeah, no,” Adam stammered, turning red.

“Something bothering you?” Tanner asked, looking genuinely concerned. Adam melted a little. It was okay to tell Tanner that he was worried, wasn’t it? He didn’t have to be strong for Tanner, didn’t have to protect him. So Adam did something that surprised even him. He was honest.

“I’m really kind of panicking about this whole thing,” Adam confessed. “You meeting my friends and all. I’m worried that… that they’ll be awful to you, and that you won’t like me anymore because of it.” The last part came out in a rush; Adam himself hadn’t realized how frightening that possibility was until he’d said it. Because Tanner—Tanner really _liked_ him. He didn’t have to be a certain way, or a certain version of himself that wasn’t entirely true anymore. Tanner just flat liked him, and he didn’t have to hide.

“Well, are they awful people?” Tanner asked, rather too logically for Adam’s comfort. He felt like an asinine child.

“Not especially,” Adam said, feeling loyal; and then less so, as he added, “Yeah, kind of.”

Tanner laughed openly. “Adam,” he said reasonably, “I’m sure they aren’t that—”

“It’s just—well, Smith’s dead,” Adam blurted out suddenly. Ah, this had been the thing he’d been hiding from Tanner. When he’d missed a week of school and copied Tanner’s chem notes, he said he’d been sick. At the time it had seemed truer that way—to call Smith’s death an affliction, something that might pass, something he could be healed from. Something there was a cure for.

“Who…?” Tanner started to ask, looking puzzled.

Adam paid him no mind. “Just a month ago. Not—not even. It all just… ended. And he was just a kid—I mean, eighteen, a baby, really, like you and me and—and none of us, not any of us, thought it could—and it hit us really hard. All of us. Of course it did. Only—it hurt each of us differently, you know? So lately—we’ve all been kind of—off, you know? Like parodies of ourselves—or like renderings done by someone who’d never met us, who got the faces mostly right but was just guessing on the rest. I mean, obviously. And I’m just not sure—”

Adam’s voice broke, and he felt wetness building in his eyes. Great—just fucking great. Maybe he didn’t have to be strong for Tanner, but he couldn’t fall the hell apart either. Adam breathed deeply, shoulders expanding and collapsing as he tried to collect himself. But Tanner’s face had fallen, and he was looking at Adam with such softness, such _sadness_ , that he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t fight feeling back, not this time.

Tanner reached out tentatively and wrapped first one arm, then another, around Adam’s heaving shoulders. Tanner held him, and for the first time, he cried.

 

 

Klonopin. It was a miracle. Jade wasn’t lighter than air—he _was_ air, air and lightness and nothing. He was the palest palette of food: white rice, whole-grain crackers, the soft flesh of cooked chicken. He was white asparagus, tender and young; a glass of skim milk, frosted over; uncooked pasta spilling across beige marble countertops. He existed in these things, in between then; in their pale neutrality, in their nothingness, in the way you could eat and eat and never be full.

“You ‘cited?” Jade slurred to Dave, when his friend came to collect him. The drowsy haze of calm that was pleasantly enveloping him made it difficult to work around hard consonants. He didn’t mind it. He didn’t mind anything.

“Are you _drunk_?” Dave asked incredulously.

Jade didn’t seem to have heard. “D’you think asood wear pans?” he asked thickly. “Imee, do inee ‘em?”

“Pans? Why would you wear— _pants_ , Jade? Are you asking me if I think you should wear _pants_? Because yes, you definitely should wear—”

Jade waved his hand ineffectually at Dave. “Of course  
imna drunk,” he assured Dave belatedly, as if he had only just asked. “M’jus chill s’all.” Jade teetered forward precariously and Dave steadied him. “Honissly, s’na li’ iben drinkun.”

Dave raised his eyebrows, looking his slightly swaying friend up and down. “Yeah, well, put some pants on, okay? I think the combination of late, half-naked, and drunk, when we’ve sworn to be on our best behavior, might just push Ads over the edge.”

“Imna drunk!” Jade sing-songed, staggering into his room in search of pants, which he still thought were superfluous. (Not that he was going to say so. ‘Superfluous’ was a tricky word.)

 

 

Dave steered Jade out of the car and up Adam’s front walk. He was surprised to see Adam and a blond boy sitting on the front steps; Adam was slouched over his own knees, red eyes fixed on the ground. The blond boy, tall and gangly— _he definitely has a type_ , thought Dave—was tentatively rubbing his back.

Both of them looked up as Dave shuffled toward them, half supporting Jade, who was giggling.

“Hello,” the blond boy said softly, giving them a small smile.

Dave gave a half-wave with his free hand. Jade, on the other hand, spun his head around to stare wide-eyed at Tanner. “So you’re the boyfriend,” he slurred. Dave had force-fed him scalding coffee from a nearby White Hen. It had, at very least, made him more easily comprehensible. Which was not necessarily the greatest thing.

Adam’s face contorted into what looked like agony. Dave picked up on the distress signal, if he didn’t understand it; he said quickly, “Don’t listen to him, he’s drunk.”

Jade craned his neck exaggeratedly to look at Dave. “M’not,” he mumbled, but it was without much conviction.

“I’m Dave,” Dave said awkwardly, trying to put enough distance between now and when Jade had spoken that Adam’s panicked, bloodshot eyes would return to a semi-normal state. “And my indisposed compatriot here is Jade.”

The blond boy stood, glancing at Adam, trying to gauge his own behavior. Adam was no help; if Dave didn’t know better, he’d say his friend had been crying. “I’m Tanner,” he said, sticking out his hand. Dave shook it poorly, crippled with the brunt of Jade’s weight.

In an unprecedented display of coordination, Jade shifted his weight back onto his own feet, and swayed threateningly at Tanner. He looked the blond boy hard in the eyes and said thickly, “I don’ like you.”

At this, Adam finally looked up. Dave smiled in weak apology. “Um, like I said, he’s somewhat intoxicated… Listen, I won’t ask you to forgive him, just… excuse him. Like an alcoholic uncle. Make his excuses and resent him forever, that kind of thing.”

Tanner, who had been looking uneasy only moments ago, let out a loud, surprised laugh. “Oh, you’re very funny!” he said happily, eyes shining. Dave saw immediately why Adam liked him. It wasn’t that he was friendly, even—just that he was sincere. Everything about him, from his shyness to his burst of laughter, was achingly sincere. Dave immediately saw the appeal in that lack of bullshit.

Tanner, still smiling gaily, glanced over at Adam. But Adam was staring, brow furrowed deeply, at Jade. _Oh, no_ , Dave found himself thinking. _Not this._

“Is he all right?” Adam asked distractedly. Dave guessed that it was he Adam was addressing, but it was hard to say, as his eyes didn’t leave Jade. Jade was looking around, quite disinterested, shadow of a relaxed smile still on his lips.

“Him?” Dave asked. Tanner’s smile was fading now, as he watched Adam watch Jade. Dave felt a sudden weight on him, almost as if Jade had slumped back onto him; but it wasn’t that. It was something heavy in his gut, a kind of dread. He saw what was happening, what was going to happen; and he didn’t want to watch his friend get hurt all over again. “Oh yeah, he’s fine,” Dave lied smoothly. “C’mon, idiot, let’s go inside,” he muttered to Jade, who gave no indication of comprehension as Dave steered him up the front steps by the elbow. “He’ll be just fine. We’ll—um—be in the den, yeah?” He thought quickly. “Tanner, want to come? We can get the movie set up,” he added. Jade was near enough a comatose state that he doubted it would come to a confrontation between him and Tanner; most importantly right now, he judged, was getting Jade out of Adam’s sight for long enough to Adam to collect himself. Losing one friend was… well, ‘hard’ didn’t begin to describe it. Dave could easily understand the panic Adam was feeling for his best friend. If something so awful, so accidental, had happened to Smith… why couldn’t it happen to Jade? Jade, who he’d always fought to protect, who’d never noticed? Dave could see the thoughts working over Adam’s face.

“Adam, make some popcorn, okay?” he called back to his friend. “Take… take your time. We won’t start the previews without you.”

 

 

Adam took a longer time than he should have, knowing he was abandoning Tanner with no more assurance than his own faith in Dave, who had been pretty questionable lately. But there was thinking he had to do, thinking he couldn’t put off any longer. It was real; it was happening; and it needed to be dealt with.

Knowledge had just dropped into his bones with enough force to shatter. It was silly, stupid, useless regret—but it was his. It was true. He hadn’t wanted Jade to find out like this.

The way Adam saw it, he… well. He loved Jade. And he loved him beyond body, beyond form. He loved him purely enough to defy nature, defy convention, defy society. He loved him fiercely enough to accept persecution, and violence and loathing as the consequences. His love was strong enough to persevere, to withstand all this and remain love, remain faithful, remain true. And—if ever he were to tell Jade—he had wanted him to know that. That it wasn’t just love, like a man was free to feel for a woman; it was commitment and suffering, devotion and pain, what a man must be willing to endure to love another man. He had wanted Jade to know that he really meant it—wanted it badly enough to walk through fire to get it.

But Jade finding out like this was all wrong. It was no longer a declaration of love; now it was just a filthy, shameful confession of… of the perversion intrinsic to his nature… and the only person he was sacrificing himself for was Tanner. Not that Tanner wasn’t great, but… Now he could never tell Jade the truth about what he felt, because now what would it do but confirm the creeping fear he was certain Jade now felt, a tarnished memory of every time they’d slept on the same couch, every time they’d wrestled shirtless in the bay; every moment they’d shared was now suspect. Jade would never catch his arm in fright over a startling movie moment again, because he’d be worried Adam might make something of it, might take it the wrong way; because he’d be afraid to touch his best friend’s skin; because he’d desperately want to circumvent the reality of what Adam had felt for years. And Adam knew too that they would never accidentally brush hands again; they would never hug again; there would never be an honestly intimate moment, a result of years of friendship, between the two boys again. And it wasn’t just because he loved him that the thought gave Adam pain. It was because Jade had been his best and most loyal friend as far back as he cared to remember; and he couldn’t help but feel, helplessly, that all of that was over now. That he’d ended it.

Adam had never hated so fiercely the violent longing he couldn’t help but feel. His own despicable nature had lessened the most important thing in his life; cheapened it, ruined it, left him clinging to the empty ashes.

It was at this moment, his lowest, his darkest, that Tanner stepped cautiously onto the porch. His nose was wrinkled in displeasure. “I burned the popcorn,” he pronounced, the levity in his voice barely sounding constructed at all. “Jade’s like some kind of zombie, and Dave keeps looking at me like he _expects_ something. Did you tell him I do tricks?” Tanner paused, maybe hoping Adam would laugh, before adding more softly, “Basically, everything’s falling apart without you.” He flashed Adam a smile meant to cheer him up, and it did go a small way towards filling the pit inside him.

“Yeah,” Adam said, smiling weakly and getting to his feet. “Shall I come inside and save the day?”

Tanner’s eyes were soft in acknowledgement of the pain Adam had not shared with him, but that was the only thing that belied his grin and easy laughter as the two boys went inside, smell of intentionally burnt popcorn filling the air.

 

 

The movie passed in relative silence. With the half of his brain he was still in possession of, Jade listened hard and tried to make sense of the French. His eyes wouldn’t focus on the subtitles. He could string the occasional phrase together, but it was nothing to brag about. The thing was, he thought, not thinking, the thing _was_ , nothing mattered anyway. Not the movie, not the room, not the people in it, not the world.

And he was okay with that.

Jade stared openly at Tanner, not concerned about whether or not the boy saw. Jade wondered if he was good-looking, or smart, or funny, or kind. He couldn’t tell. Didn’t care to tell. In fact he’d be content to sit in this armchair always and let time go on without him—people would come and go, day would turn to night and back again, the people who passed him would get older and older, the world would change, all in an indifferent blur. And Jade would sit, sit and preside over nothing, sit and breathe and watch the days change, going on without him.

Jade wondered dully if that’s what the afterlife was. If that’s what Smith was doing. He wondered indifferently if believing in some god or another would make this any easier. He wondered if anything would, anything shy of oblivion.

The credits rolled before Jade was ready for them to. He felt his body movie, lifting him to his feet beyond his control. Tanner tried to meet his eyes, but there was nothing in them. His smile faltered on his rosy cheeks. From far away, Jade heard him ask if they’d liked the movie. He didn’t seem able to speak.

“It was a comedy,” Jade heard Dave say, in disbelief. “It was dressed up like a drama, but—you got Adam to watch a comedy. There was hardly any blood at all. He must really like you.” Jade could almost have smiled at how little those words had hurt him, at how wonderful he felt, feeling nothing.

“It made me think that maybe I’d like to go into film,” Adam said, a strange dream-like quality to his voice, almost wistful, as if speaking of a future he’d never really have. “I mean—it was beautiful, wasn’t it? That we were able to laugh at such a dark, desperate thing? That someone could write a screenplay like that, and still find something for an audience to laugh about? It’s like… hope, isn’t it? I wouldn’t mind a future in that. In hope.”

Jade thought aimlessly about what a false, hollow word that was to cling to—hope. You couldn’t make a career trafficking in lies. Or at least, no one he knew could. Adam was too honest for that kind of thing. But he didn’t say so.

Jade noticed that Adam’s hand was linked with Tanner’s, one long arm sweeping gracefully into another, as if they were never meant to be parted. Well—that was pretty of them. In front of everyone, not caring, not trying to hide it. In emulation of that sentiment, Jade fished a Sonata out of his pocket and swallowed it dry, daring them to say something, except that he didn’t care if they did or they didn’t, didn’t give a damn either way. Tanner gave him a questioning look he didn’t deign to answer. It didn’t matter—not really. Nothing did.

 

 

Tanner wiped his palms on his jeans, hoping Adam didn’t notice that they were sweating. He felt like an idiot, being nervous like this. But he _liked_ Adam. He’d liked him since their first class together. And if he seemed different now than when they’d first met, if he’d lost someone he’d loved a month ago and been badly hurt by it, well, Tanner only liked him more for it. Privately he thought it had taken a great deal of courage for Adam to share his grief like he’d done earlier; and what Adam had said about film and hope had been beautiful. Tanner didn’t know anyone who thought that way—so profoundly. Besides which, he couldn’t help but be flattered by the way Adam had opened up to him, had wanted to introduce him to his friends, had been so adorably worried about how they’d behave. Truly, he was walking on air. It was such a perfect day.

Well—almost. True, Adam had reached for his hand this time; he’d almost died of joy. And yes, Dave seemed like a cool guy, seemed to approve of Tanner, was making an effort to get to know him a little bit… But then there was Jade.

Tanner just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that Jade wanted him dead.

One of the best-looking men Tanner had ever seen, he had said approximately ten words all day. He’d stared at Tanner for most of the film, plainly, like a challenge, like he wanted Tanner to know he disliked him—and yet without challenge, and without dislike. And the state he’d shown up in—fall-down drunk in the middle of the day! Tanner tried, really he did, to like everyone; or at least understand how they saw things, even if he didn’t agree with it. But Jade—he just didn’t like him. The feeling was visceral, instinctive; something about Jade set off every warning bell Tanner had.

Still, he wasn’t going to give up. He’d see Jade again, he was sure of it—maybe sober this time. And he’d try again, start fresh, try to erase the primordial distrust he felt for the other man.

The thoughts churning through Tanner’s mind stuttered to a halt as he and Adam hesitated at the front door. The foyer was dark as the last rays of daylight slipped over the horizon. Adam took his hand and squeezed it lightly.

“I wanted to apologize for the way Jade acted today,” he said in a low voice. Dave and Jade were still in the other room. “I hope he didn’t scare you off.”

Tanner smiled, giddy with happiness. Adam was standing incredibly close. Just inches between them… “You’ve done the opposite of that,” Tanner breathed, unable to speak, heart fluttering like a bird in his chest.

“Tanner, I…” Adam shifted his weight awkwardly. Tanner could tell he was nervous. “I really like you. Um—I mean that. And I—I want to—” Adam laughed at himself, embarrassed. “You’re going to laugh at me,” he confided, smiling with real happiness as he looked into Tanner’s electric blue eyes. “But I’m going to ask anyway. You’re making it—” Adam faltered for a moment, smile fading into seriousness; Tanner felt himself trembling—“impossible not to,” Adam breathed. “I want to kiss you,” he said suddenly, almost gruffly, before he could lose his nerve. Tanner felt light-headed. “Would you—?”

“Yes,” Tanner whispered, about to burst.

Tanner closed his eyes as Adam’s lips brushed his gently, once and then again, meeting with more certainty the second time. The kiss itself lasted only a few seconds; Tanner knew already that the effects would last hours. Knees weak, Tanner accepted a goodbye hug from Adam, thrilled by the length of their bodies touching; he murmured a few parting words, hardly able to keep from laughing aloud; and he floated out the door, certain that he was the happiest man alive.

 

 

If the extent of his misery were any indication, the Klonopin had worn off.

“They’re probably making out right now,” Jade said loudly to Dave, half-hoping his voice would carry. “God, how disgusting. Can you think of anything more revolting?”

By now, he had taken all the Sonatas Hunter had given him. Stupidly, he’d swallowed the last one hours ago, in a haze of numbness. It didn’t seem to be helping. After the total neutrality coma of the Klonopin, the dampening effects of Sonata seemed like nothing. He was feeling altogether too much.

Dave looked at Jade like he was a stranger. “Actually, I don’t think there’s anything disgusting about Adam finally making himself happy.” Dave sounded aggressive, almost accusatory. Drunk on the newness of sensation, on anger, Jade was glad for it. Good. Let them fight. He wanted to feel pain. He wanted everyone in the world to feel it.

“ _Happy_? Is that what he is?” Jade asked scathingly. “It’s fucking _unnatural_ , that’s what it is. It’s—fucking _perverse_.” Jade meant it. God, did he mean it. Did he know it! He’d told himself that every day for years. Every time they’d so innocently touched… every time he’d pretended to be frightened and grabbed Adam’s hand… every time he’d watched admiringly the masculine grace of his friend’s movement… every smile he’d seen, every note of laughter… every time he’d ached with need, need he knew was disgusting, forbidden, _wrong_ …

“I’m going to pretend you don’t know what you’re saying,” Dave said heatedly, frowning angrily. “I’m going to pretend you don’t have any idea what the hell you’re talking about, and you might want to think about pretending that too.”

Didn’t he, though? Didn’t he know what he was saying—better than anyone? Hadn’t he earned this? Hadn’t he suffered enough by now to make someone else do the same? Hadn’t he felt enough that he deserved to make someone else feel something?

“Doesn’t it make your skin crawl? The thought of it—all the times he’s been in the room while you’ve been changing, or—”

Dave got to his feet, fists clenched. “I don’t know what the hell has gotten into you,” he said, almost yelling in anger, “but you don’t have any idea what you’re saying, okay? So just—fucking—drop it!”

But Jade didn’t feel like dropping anything. He felt like feeling his face break under Dave’s small, hard fists—his nose crunching, his flesh soft and twisted, blood breaking through the skin, teeth torn loose with hunks of tissue still attached, a pulpy hole opening in his tongue where molars met meat—

“If I were a fucking faggot, I’d kill myself,” Jade hissed, pushing his face right up in Dave’s, waiting for, wiling the blow to come, waiting for the pain, begging for it—come on, come on, hit me, do it, hurt me, now—“I’d kill myself, I’d fucking KILL MYSELF! I wouldn’t deserve to live—” He was yelling now, hysteric; he was dimly aware of it; any second now he’d feel it, the impact of Dave’s fist, rending his flesh and bone and blood apart—

But it didn’t come, and didn’t come, and didn’t come. Dave was just standing there, staring at him, plainly horrified.

“Do it!” Jade heard himself roar, anger sliding away, dropping off like water, fear welling up to take its place; hopelessness and fear… “Why won’t you just fucking _hit me_?” he yelled, but now he didn’t sound angry, he sounded small and hurt and desperate, like a man who had lost too much, too, too much, and couldn’t possibly go on living—like a man who was still just a boy, who was still just a boy and had been helpless then as he was now, watching his brother shake and cough and choke and _die_ —who had done nothing when there was nothing to be done and was doing something, anything, now, the wrong thing, so long as it was something, so long as he might feel the pain all over again—so long as he might bleed, and know he was still alive—still alive while Smith was dead—still alive and still breathing and why, why, _why_ hadn’t Dave hit him, _why_ was he still breathing? “Why won’t you hit me,” he repeated, no longer a question, no longer anything but the quaking whisper of the one who had lived to watch his brother die, the one who had nothing left but this.

“I might,” Adam said grimly, voice so quiet and yet so big in the wake of Jade’s ugly plea. His hands hung limp at his sides and his eyes blazed with hurt, but neither diminished the threat in his voice as he advanced, repeated, “I just might.”  
q95;

 

End Notes:

Also, now is the time to influence me. What kind of fic do YOU want to read? I'm taking suggestions and requests, so let me know what you want to see me write.

I'd like to thank everyone for their thoughtful comments. Truly, they make all the difference to me, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You guys rock.

:goes back to listening to Crash Love:

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	9. 27 Days After

_It’s funny—if you were here, I know what you’d say. You’d say, “You really fucked this up, Jade,” and I’d be angry because it’s true. I have. I know it._

_I’d still like to hear you say it, though. Even if I’d only yell at you for it._

_The last few days, I’ve exhausted my supply of pocket sonatas, and it’s strange how clearly I’m thinking. I mean, I’m incredibly coherent. I can see this… pattern emerging. The unifying strokes that make sense of senseless tragedies… like death. Like life in the first place._

_I feel you, too. The way you aren’t. I feel it every second, all the way to my bones. If you must know, I’m using it to punish myself, to purge the things I said from my bones. Flay my skin until the only thing left is scars—call it forgiveness. Absolution. The next best thing._

_Except, I don’t deserve to be absolved._

_~~I’m still disappointed that his fists didn’t bruise me down to the bone. Disappointed that they didn’t touch me at all. He wanted to. He would have. I don’t know what stopped him. But Smith… you were the lucky one. Existence is pain. Life is suffering. And here I am, suffering it; maybe you were right to die. Maybe you knew better than the rest of us. Maybe it wasn’t hypothermia—maybe it was your last ‘fuck you’ to the universe.~~ _

_I wish you’d let me in on the secret, though. Ahead of time. Given me the good sense to drown._

_I don’t want to be forgiven._

_— Jade_

 

 

27 DAYS AFTER

 

Dave didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to exploit his tragedy, didn’t want to pimp it out, but it had only been four weeks. Four weeks his best friend had been dead. He didn’t know yet how to cope with that—didn’t know how to feel about it, or what to do with it. Sometimes he still didn’t even believe it was true.

He sat at the grave site, face to face with the fresh granite, and tore up handfuls of tender grass. He tore them up frantically, like a man crazed. He didn’t know what else to do. All he knew was, with the grass all grown over like that, it looked like Smith had been dead forever. It looked like any other grave in the lot—a little cleaner, a little less weathered, but same engraved stone, same plastic flowers, same solid cover of grass. Dave didn’t want that. He’d thought, once, that he did; but he’d been wrong. He didn’t want the earth to heal over his friend like time had passed, like it was true, like all that was left of Smith was really down there… like what was down there was really all that was left of Smith. Because he knew better. He did.

Out of grass, Dave was seizing handfuls of dirt, flinging them out over his shoulder. The earth was hard and cold; it was almost November. As the shallow trench grew larger, his fingers grew colder and stiffer, his frenzy dying with the knowledge that even if he dug until his broken fingers and bloody nails scraped the coffin it wouldn’t change a thing.

Panting, covered with dirt, Dave knelt before the muddy mess he’d made of his friend’s grave, cold loose dirt flung everywhere, the shallow hole in front of him neither deep nor grand enough to swallow him whole, which probably wasn’t what he really wanted anyway. He let his head drop, chin hitting his chest, and bit his lip to keep from crying.

“Miss you,” he muttered, laughing weakly. He tore his eyes from the earth and looked up to the bright sparks of light just becoming visible in the darkening sky. “Miss you,” he repeated in a small voice, meaning it, meaning it, meaning it.  
q95;

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	10. 4 Weeks After

_I don’t think you know what it’s like, to still be alive. We all know it’s a sham, Smith. We all know it’s pretend. Because there can’t be anything, not really, not without you. But we don’t know what else to do, so we keep going through the motions, keep pretending it’s all right. Like sheep._

_Well, I’m not a sheep, Smith. If everyone else who knew you, if everyone else who loved you, if any of them did, wants to be fucking cattle and keep pretending that the world’s still turning, that day becomes night becomes day, that calendar pages are turning and your birthday’s coming closer, the fucking_ holidays _—talk about your tawdry punch line to the worst joke ever told—are advancing on us, hollow and menacing and fake as ever—well, that’s their prerogative. If they think they can keep the ruse going, that’s their business, because I can’t._

_Do you know, Smith—do you know—it’s not so long from now that you’d be graduating? Out of high school and all grown up. My_ brother _, Smith. That’s you._ That was you.

_You were the best fucking brother in the world._

_Smith, Sam came into my room yesterday. He sat down on my bed and he cleared his throat. Have you ever seen that man nervous? Have you ever seen him feel anything less than 110% comfortable in any situation? Smith, he didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to do with his hands, or his face, or his voice. And he wouldn’t look at me. He looked at his hands. He said, “Jade, I know this is hard for you. It’s hard for all of us. But I’m worried about you. You don’t seem… yourself.”_

_Can you believe it? The balls of that guy. Don’t seem myself? How the hell could I seem like myself without you here? If you’re dead, if you could just_ end _like that, who the fuck am I? Who are any of us?_

_And then he started crying, Smith. Fucking Sam. I always hated that guy, did you know that? You were younger, I think. You liked him. You never resented him the way I… you never knew what I meant when I said that I hated him. You never understood how far down that feeling went; how true it was. But I always hated him._

_Hating him, watching him cry, it should have felt good, right? But it made me feel worse than ever. Sick inside, like my intestines were in knots, you know? Because I hated to just watch him cry. I hated to believe that he missed you and loved you and cared about you like I do. And there was nothing I could do._

_Why won’t you come back, Smith? Dad won’t stop calling. I guess Sam gave him the number. He wants to talk to me, to Mom. Neither of us will take the calls. Him and Sam have been talking a lot. They got dinner together the other night. How fucked is that? Sam and Mom not talking, except for when they’re screaming at each other. Alisha’s idiot friends, never around anymore. Gibson, who doesn’t even really understand, barely eating. And Sam and Dad getting dinner together. This isn’t life, Smith. This is a fucking joke._

_You were the best person I ever knew, even when you were lazy or selfish or flaky or mean. Even when you were the worst, you were the best. And it’s killing me, killing all of us, to be without you._

_We don’t just want you back. We_ need _you. And you won’t come, you asshole. You won’t come home._

_— Jade_

 

 

4 WEEKS AFTER

 

Hunter sauntered into the waiting room, fifteen minutes early for his appointment with his eighth grief counselor. Dana had finally broken.

At the same time, Hunter knew he’d have to be gentle with this last one. There were only eight of them in this building. When he beat this one, it’d be on to a new facility for him. He didn’t want to leave Zombie in the lurch.

Ha! Hunter congratulated himself on his own wit, and went to sit down.

He didn’t make it that far. Zombie accosted him, grabbing him by the elbow and escorting him right back out into the lobby. “You’re here early,” Hunter said, voice his surprise.

“I need more,” Zombie said, in the voice of someone not to be fucked with. Hunter thought that the voice was unnecessary; who the hell fucked with zombies anyway?

“You’re a little worked up,” Hunter said, very aware of the death grip Zombie had on his elbow. It was starting to hurt. “Relax, okay?” He cast a furtive look at the security camera mounted in the corner. “Seriously, it looks like you’re mugging me. Can we please chill?”

Zombie was speaking more quickly than a zombie had any right to, still sounding murderously scary. “Listen, I need more—more than Sonata. Something stronger—I can feel too much, too much. You have to make it go away!”

Hunter was having trouble keeping his cool. Zombies happen to be incredibly threatening creatures when they want to. Granted—he’d never been intimidated by a single zombie before, it was usually the whole horde—but he was open to new experiences.

“I didn’t bring anything stronger, you goddamn junky,” Hunter spat, trying to seem commanding. “That’s what you have my fucking _number_ for, ass brain: Special. Orders. Now let go of me.”

Zombie did as he was told, brown eyes wide with panic and hunger for brains. “But I don’t want to feel anything,” he said softly, helplessly.

Hunter gave him a look. “Don’t want to feel—?” he repeated. “Feeling’s all we’ve got, son. All that separates us from them.” Hunter made a vague gesture, not certain himself if he was indicating the world of people who hadn’t suffered losses like theirs, or the robot hordes who felt nothing.

Zombie stared at him blankly. “You’re the shittiest drug dealer ever,” he finally said, sounding sullen. “I don’t want a fucking pep talk. I want something stronger.”

Hunter was shocked. Shocked, and appalled. And hurt! He was not a petty street thug. A drug dealer! Really. They were evolved men. There was no need to be so crude.

“Excuse me, but I very much resent your choice of terminology. It’s true that there are many services I can offer, and it’s true that one of these is furnishing my clients with limited chemical relief, but—”

Zombie’s eyes glinted with malicious light as he interjected cruelly, “Chemical relief? Jesus Christ, you’re selling drugs! You get that, don’t you? It’s not some noble _service_ you’re providing—you’re illegally selling prescription drugs! Like scum on the street. Don’t you understand what we are, you and I? The dealer and the junky? We’re not people anymore!” Zombie’s voice was rising in fervor toward a panicked spit-flecked scream. His eyes were wild. “We’re degenerates! The degenerate refuse of a non-functional society—because that’s all that’s left for us! That’s all that they left us, when they died. That’s the only hope they let us have! All you _do_ —everything that makes up your life anymore—is _selling drugs_!”

“For an incredibly reasonable rate!” Hunter protested, at once wounded and frightened and betrayed. Whatever happened to the bond of brotherhood and eternal gratitude they’d forged under the watchful eyes of Agent Neon? He’d thought Zombie was cool! Not the kind of guy who took potshots at a friend. A friend who had never asked questions, who had never asked anything return (well, except money—but his rates really were reasonable!), who had been there and done exactly what Zombie had asked of him. And this was how he was repaid? Hunter composed himself, head held high, voice quivering with offended pride. “If that’s the way you feel—certainly there’s no need further need for us to prolong this sham of a business relationship—”

But Zombie cut him off again, not interested in Hunter’s righteous indignation. “No, I don’t agree. Here—” and he shoved a folded, sweaty fifty dollar bill into Hunter’s hand—“give me what you have on you, all of it, and you can bring me the rest tonight.”

“Zomms, man, I thought you were cool,” Hunter said helplessly, handing over the baggie in plain sight of the security camera, hoping against hope someone actually watched the tapes, hoping against hope someone who knew what to do would see the illicit exchange and give Zombie whatever it was he needed. “I’m just trying to help you. I just—I thought I could do better than these clowns, you know? Because they’re clowns, stooges, and I know it, and you know it, and—you think our pal Danny has ever lost anyone? You think he’s ever really loved someone, and then just watched them die? Do you think—damn it, Zombie, don’t be this way. I thought I could help you.”

Zombie grunted a response, fishing out two small pink pills and swallowing them dry. Hunter had not felt quite so helpless in months. Zombie turned and stalked into the waiting room, a hunted look in his eyes, leaving Hunter even more alone than he’d thought he was.

 

 

“Four weeks ago today,” Adam said tonelessly, hanging his feet in the frigid water. “I don’t even believe it.”

“It’s like it’s not real,” Dave agreed, echoing the sentiment.

“I’ve been having dreams,” Adam started, and then stopped abruptly. He glanced surreptitiously at Dave, who was staring unseeing out across the water. “That I’m drowning,” he finished, muttering, sounding embarrassed. “I know it’s stupid—he didn’t even drown—but I keep having the dream. I’m underwater, it’s dark and I’m sinking, and I can’t breathe, and then I see him—except it’s not him—his face is white and soft and his skin is just falling off his bones—and he’s rotting, and one of his eyes is eaten away and the other is just… just awful goo and sores… and there’s fish all around, eating him, and they start biting me—and it, he, he wants me to help him, and I can’t breathe… I wake up screaming. I never try to help him, just to get away, just to save myself even though it’s too late… And I’m so scared every time—” Adam broke off, self-disparaging. “It’s not even real. I mean, the whole time, I know that I’m dreaming. I’m just really frightened that I won’t wake up and start breathing again.” He paused before adding, “I know. I watch too many zombie movies, and… how stupid is that.”

Dave seemed not to hear at first, but then straightened up and said suddenly, “I don’t think it’s stupid. I don’t think that being afraid is something to be ashamed of.” He turned, looked hard at Adam. “Do you?” he asked.

Adam had the feeling that Dave was asking about more than fear, but he didn’t know what. He shrugged. “Well, _I_ always feel ashamed,” he said. “Like I’m letting someone down. But I don’t think that it’s necessarily the correct way to feel.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever go swimming again,” Dave admitted candidly. “Your dream of Smith rotting at the bottom of the Bay sure doesn’t help, either. And I just wouldn’t feel—”

Before Dave could finish his sentence, Adam had shoved him off the dock with two hands, laughing, meaning it. Dave flailed to the surface, wet and spluttering. “What the fuck!” he howled, looking outraged (and, Adam felt, hilarious). “I was—I mean, I really meant—you stupid dick—”

“I was trying to imagine spending my whole life too afraid to get in the water because of what happened to Smith, because of some awful dream,” Adam explained, still laughing as if it were a fabulous joke. “And that’s awful, Dave. No way to live.”

“You’re a little dry to administer life lessons, aren’t you?” Dave hissed, seizing Adam’s ankles and tugging his friend into the freezing bay with a splash. Adam, too, floundered to the surface looking scandalized.

“See,” Dave shivered, treading icy water. “Now it’s funny.”

 

 

Ellie stood in the doorway, a ghostly silhouette. The sun had just set; the hallways was dark behind her and light was fading from Jade’s room quickly. Her face was a pale still blur. There were dark hollows, absence of light, where her eyes were meant to be. It made her look dead, an apparition. Jade stared blankly back at her, a mirror.

“There’s someone here for you,” his mother finally said, her voice hoarse and far away.

Jade’s face lit with recognition, as if seeing her there for the first time. “Adam?” he asked, betrayed by the hope bare in his voice.

Ellie didn’t notice. She stood in silence, one hand on her brow. “Oh…” she said softly, faintly, turning to walk away.

Jade hated her suddenly, as her back receded; hated her through the indistinct sluggishness he felt. He hated how useless grief had made her, how hopeless; he hated that she had given up without a fight, sunk into herself like a tar pit and left the rest of them to fend for themselves. Even he had fought harder than she had. How could she just surrender? Of course… he knew now that she had been right not to struggle… that it was easier, less painful, to give in… The darkness swallowed her outline and Jade was ill with loathing; because she had left, pulled back into herself, as if without Smith there was nothing left to live for; as if she had no other children. As if there was no other world. And maybe he didn’t hate her for giving in so much as he hated her for being so damnably right, the first time, without throwing herself against the stones, begging for forgiveness, for a second chance. She had given up without struggle; she had spared herself the pain, the effort, of a fight for survival.

Jade heard Sam’s voice carrying down the hall to where he stood, still, relishing his pain, savoring the anger and the hatred, drawing out the guilty luxury in feeling. “You’re being selfish, Ellie,” he heard his stepfather say. His cheeks didn’t burn with humiliation and his flesh did not crawl with discomfort. He was hollow, he was a husk; he was not ashamed to listen. He could not help but hear. “You’re acting like you’re the only one in pain.”

“I’m not in pain,” Ellie’s voice glided, dissonant, and Jade wanted to back her up, to explain to Sam how true it was. “I’m not anything, Sam.”

“You have other children,” Sam hissed urgently, the argument Jade had waged silently now playing out for all to hear, careless. Other children—yes. And they’d all of them struggled to unhear the fights unfolding onto the strained chords of that marriage; and they’d each struggled to unsee Smith’s blue muddy skin.

There were some things, some truths, that could not be undone.

The only thing you could do was try not to feel them.

“You—we—have to be there for them,” Sam was saying, helpless, desperate, unraveling. Not strong and certain but pleading. It was finally catching up to him, then; the strain of holding them all together. Self-pity seeped into his voice and Jade was able to loathe him, too, wholly. “They—I—need you.”

“My son is dead!” Jade heard his mother cry suddenly, sounding more alive than she had in weeks, in a sudden brilliant dash of pain that had gotten through her shroud. She was dead, too. They all were. And yet—Jade could tell, by the sharp edge of her voice, that he’d hear her crying tonight, when she thought they were asleep, just as before.

He shook his own blurred head, breaking free, remembering that someone was waiting for him. Not Adam—and that meant salvation had arrived, that it was too late for anything else. He trudged down the dark stairs and found Hunter in the dusk-lit foyer at the bottom of them.

“Nice place,” Hunter said dryly, peroxide hair catching what little light there was. “Real upbeat.”

“Outside,” Jade grunted, steering his guest back through the front door, much as he’d done earlier. He couldn’t tell if Hunter was still angry with him or not. He was here, though; that was something. That was the last thought he spared to Hunter’s feelings. It didn’t occur to Jade that he might have them. “My little sister’s home; I don’t want her seeing you,” he offered dully, explanation. _This is why you are unwelcome in my home_ , he might as well have said, except it wasn’t so much a home anymore as it was unlit hallways, darkened bedrooms, frightened children listening to their parents scream, and emptiness, the dark gravity of Smith’s doorway, the dusty, disorderly room of his things no one had set foot in, no one could look at, no one was able to tend to.

Hunter was visibly annoyed. “Yes, fine, I see how it is,” he snapped irritably. “I drive all the way out here to meet your psychotic demands, and no hello, no how are you doing Hunter, you’re not even going to make sure I’m not a pod person for _courtesy’s_ sake…”

Jade interrupted, not finding himself moved to care. He said helpfully, “That’s because I don’t give a shit if you’re a pod person—” Hunter gasped, scandalized—“as long as you’ve got what I need.”

“You are not the masterful negotiator I once thought you were, friend,” Hunter said stiffly, offended on every level, and gravely disappointed. “In fact, Mr. Puget, I daresay that out professional relationship is at an end.”

The significance of his real name from Hunter’s lips did not penetrate Jade’s fractured consciousness. Instead, he let the instinctual reaction of anger steer him.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jade asked scathingly, eager to altercate. “I don’t offer you a cup of tea, and suddenly you won’t deal with me anymore? What the hell kind of business do you run?”

Hunter’s voice shook in indignation, the only response Jade had been soliciting from him today, as he replied. “I think you are confused by the nature of my services,” he said tartly. He’d thought Jade knew him better than this. “Truly, I doubt you grasp the kind of operation I run at all. I offered you _help_ , Mr. Puget; chemical intervention on the demolition course of grieving. I bought you time to sort things out calmly instead of drowning in them—like people who take a Valium before they go into surgery so they can make it to the hospital without breaking down. Because they know they need the surgery, but can’t get there unassisted. I saw you in that waiting room and thought, now here’s a brainless flesh-eater who needs a friend, someone who understands his nosferatu woes… But you don’t want my help!” Hunter crowed accusingly. This was, apparently, the worst of Jade’s offenses. “The only thing you want from me—”

“Is drugs,” Jade finished neatly. “Yes. Do you have them?”

Lips contorted with disgust, Hunter shoved an orange bottle wrapped in Jade’s fifty dollar bill into Jade’s hands, an ugly look on his face. “Yes, I have your fucking narcotics. Enjoy addiction, asshole.”

Hunter turned on heel and marched down the front walk as Jade studied the label on the bottle. _Percocet_ , it read. _Active ingredients oxycodone, acetaminophen. 650 mg. Burgan, Hunter_.

“These are… yours?” Jade asked quietly. Hunter hesitated, but did not turn around. He spoke with a soft defiance, facing away from Jade, shoulders squared and head held up.

“Yes,” he pronounced deliberately, “they are. And they’ll send you to hell, Jade, if you’re not careful.”

Jade kept his eyes on that proud white head, not sure what to say. “I’ll… be careful,” he finally decided on, hoping he meant it.

Hunter snorted, turning around for a last look, maybe the last look anyone would get at the boy before him. “Like hell you’ll be,” he said derisively. “For the record—I did want to be your friend. Not… do this to you. I just… wasn’t sure how to do it. I did—I did think I could help. Maybe that we could help each other. Apparently I’m retarded like that. I didn’t want to do Dana’s support group, but I thought that maybe…” Hunter realized he was still speaking, honestly and without malice, and trailed off. When his voice picked up again, it was heavy and bitter, twisting. The trace of helpless laughter, the sound of hands in the air, pale and useless, was gone. “But hey, fuck yourself. You don’t care about me, I get it. So I’ll do my damnedest not to care about you when you take that whole bottle at once.” His voice cracked on the last words. “Fucking pod people,” he muttered disgustedly, climbing into his car.

Jade stood on the porch and watched until Hunter’s tail lights disappeared. The night was silent. He weighed the little bottle in his hand, wondering. He’d gotten what he’d wanted, even if Hunter had seen through his wanting it. So why didn’t he feel as if he’d gotten away with it? Why didn’t he feel successful—warm and clever and full? Was it true that even here, at the end of things, he’d feel… nothing?

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	11. 29 Days After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own the boys. This didn't happen. That said, you are all going to hate me for this.
> 
> Bear with me.

29 DAYS AFTER

 

Jade laid down his pen and smiled, but it was a hollow mimicry of an emotion, and if anything only made him feel worse. So there it was—his last letter. It was a shame, Jade thought, that he couldn’t mail it—that it couldn’t be to Adam, or his father, or someone who might read it. But what was done was done; he tore the page from his notebook and folded it carefully, stuffing it into the bulging envelope marked ‘Smith’ with all the others. A month of letters, and no one to read them. But maybe it was better that way.

Jade lifted the cordless handset of his phone and dialed Dave’s number slowly, ponderously, full of hope and dread. It rang once, twice, three times—and then Dave’s mother picked up.

“Hello?”

Jade’s mind went blank, heart sinking sickeningly. Somehow the possibility of anyone else answering had not occurred to him. For a second, he panicked, feeling as if she could see him, what he was doing, what he was thinking.

“Hello?” she repeated more clearly.

Startled into answering, Jade said, “Oh. Hi. It’s Jade. Is… um, is Dave there?”

“I’m sorry, dear, he’s out,” Mrs. Marchand said gently, as if handling someone very fragile. Jade wondered how she’d been handling all this, if she tip-toed around Dave too, trying desperately to keep him intact. He hadn’t thought of that before.

“Jade? Can I take a message?” she repeated. Jade realized it was not the first time she’d asked. He wasn’t sure what to say. He couldn’t say what he’d meant to.

Flustered, he patched together a sloppy lie. “Oh… yes… tell him I won’t be able to make it tonight… and if you could ask him… to tell Adam I apologize… for how I acted…?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Marchand said kindly. “Was there something else?”

“No…” Jade said vaguely, feeling tired, dully regretful. “No, that’s… all.”

He hung up the phone feeling peculiar. He’d wanted… he’d wanted to do this properly. But now it would be another loose end… a little less closure… He didn’t think it would matter much. After all, they were all well acquainted with the process, weren’t they? They had their suits… their tissue boxes… their iron masks to wear as faces…

Jade stood suddenly, straightening his tie. He’d felt terrible for the people who’d had to dress Smith… stuff clumsy, stiff limbs into a suit tailored for the living… powdering his face to hide its color, like a bruise… Jade was determined to save them the trouble of that much at least…

Jade emptied the shoebox under his bed of all the pills he’d saved. Baggies from Hunter… that despicable orange bottle… the capsules he’d sneaked from his mother’s vanity table while Sam had been out… He lined them up on his desk by size, then jumbled them up and did it by color… Alternating, he broke the pastel rainbow to make a pattern, a chain to twist around his life… and when he could prolong it no longer, he began.

He knew if he took them all at once he’d be ill and vomit before they could do their work… He’d swallow one every five minutes and force himself to stay awake until it was through… Careful, like he’d promised… He’d be aware, in control, for the duration… That was the way a deliberate action was committed… and there would be no mistake, this was a deliberate action…

By the ninth swallow, he began to feel drowsy. And he remembered the orange bottle suddenly, shockingly clear; remembered what Hunter had said and done… Pod people, honestly… Well, he didn’t want Hunter to get the blame for this, didn’t want his name to come up… didn’t want to share the responsibility, the burden; wanted to bear it on his shoulders alone… He dropped the bottle on the floor and put his foot down on it. Beneath his black lacquer dress shoe, it reluctantly crunched… he brought his foot down again, and harder, over and over, until it cracked into splinters, into smithereens… God, smithereens, what a word… What his mother had called Smith when he was small… her little smithereen… He swept up the splinters, no name left on them to read, and let them fall one by one into the trash… Put another capsule to his lips and gulped it down… And a small voice behind him, hard to hear…

“Jade? I heard crunching… What are you doing?”

It was Gibson, little Gibson, Gibson who would have no big brother left if he went through with what he was going through with. Startled, suddenly seeing clearly, Jade swept the line of salvation cleanly off his desk, clearing its surface into the trash basket waiting below. Pills scattered, skittering across the floor, flooding his room with mummadrai, anti-selves, anti-matter, the black holes of humans.

“Nothing,” Jade told Gibson, who was too young to understand but seemed frightened anyway. “Nothing,” he repeated, trying to convince at least one of them, loosening his tie, making up his mind. Hadn’t been thinking… didn’t know what he was doing… wanted to live… wanted to…

“Nothing,” Jade managed one more time, cold and clammy and blue, and fell unconscious in a heap to the floor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 _The one thing I can’t forgive is people with faith. I think that faith is the one thing beyond redemption. The ones that pull a brave smile and tell me you’re in a better place. They believe it. They say it like they_ know _it, like it’s fact, like it’s true._

_Well, how do they know? Have they been there? If being dead is so great, why don’t they just kill themselves? Why shouldn’t I?_

_They believe, they have it on_ faith _that you’re somewhere better than here, with me, with Mom and Sam and Alisha and Gibson and Dave, where you belong. They think there’s somewhere even better than that._

_I don’t think so. I think that wherever you are, you’re miserable like we are without you. I think you aren’t anywhere at all. I don’t think you get rewarded for life. I think the only reward we get, the only thing to look forward to, is rot._

_And I’m looking forward to it, little brother. I can’t fucking wait to rot beside you._

_So—don’t come home. Save me a place. I’m coming for you._

_— Jade_   
  


 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	12. 3 Months After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here it is! A time jump!
> 
> I seriously debated whether or not this was the best path for this story. I also seriously debated whether I should jump two months, two years, ten, twenty... And this is the result! Let me know what you think; you guys mean the world to me.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, and this never happened. Also, the story Hunter tells is not my own. Like the tale of what happened to Smith, it was borrowed and altered, but is the real story of a little girl's grief. Nothing I could invent could be truer or worse than the real pain that people suffer, and I wanted to honor that; rather than contorting fictional lives in fictional ways, I wanted to use real stories, real suffering, to make this story as true as it can be.

3 Months After

 

 

Jade straightened his stack of new textbooks nervously. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” he said for the hundredth time.

“Relax,” Tanner urged with his easy smile. “Really, with you coming from Berkeley? There’s nothing to worry about. I mean, UC is a good school, but… you’re more than prepared for it. Really.”

Adam turned in the passenger seat to face Jade. He fought hard to keep his face calm, expressionless, guilt free. This was the right thing to be doing, he was sure of it; that’s why it was so wrong. Bright, brilliant Jade, who could almost smile again, looked back. His eyes weren’t glazed, his face wasn’t dull. Adam kept having to remind himself this was real.

When he’d gotten the call two months ago, he had, for the first time, not hesitated. He wasn’t torn. He’d known exactly where he’d needed to be.

Tanner had driven. The three of them had been together, Tanner and Adam and Dave; they had been at Adam’s house when the phone had rung.

Adam had leapt for it, as he had done every time it rang since their fight, eager for the chance to make amends. But it was almost the opposite of that.

“Do you think it’s him this time?” Tanner had asked Dave quietly, but not so quietly that Adam hadn’t heard.

Dave had shaken his head. “I think he’s too embarrassed to apologize. He said some really awful shit—things I know he didn’t mean. I don’t think he’ll be able to apologize so soon after unless it was a life or death…”

The look on Adam’s face, drained of blood, contorted in fear and pain, had silenced his friends. They sat in worried stillness as Adam nodded, making weak sounds of comprehension into the phone.

When he hung up, he was trembling.

“It’s Jade,” he’d said to Dave, white-faced. “He’s done something terrible…”

The drive had passed in a blur: Dave moaning in the backseat, head in his hands, struggling with tears; Tanner running red lights and quantum physics alike to the get them to the hospital he’d chosen not to enter. Adam had stared straight ahead; he couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. He was vaguely aware of getting directions from a nurse and leading Dave into an elevator, of scanning room numbers, of stopping…

And then he’d seen him. Unconscious and so pale his eyelids were translucent, stuck with needles and attached to too many machines, all with dripping tubes or waving lines or inconsistent beeping.

“Jade, you son of a bitch,” he’d whimpered. Dave, crying openly, had collapsed in a chair next to Ellie, who was clutching her son’s hand so hard it would have hurt, if he were conscious; everyone’s faces unmoving, everyone silent, terror stealing away the very beating of their hearts. The words on everyone’s lips: _not again, not again, not Jade, not again_.

It was anyone’s guess how much time had passed, how long Adam had stood there, unmoving, unblinking, expressionless; but, eventually, Jade had stirred. He had woken up. His stomach, emptied with a tube. His blood put through its paces, measuring up to a battery of tests. His heart, strong enough to keep beating; his lungs, stubborn enough to fill with air.

He had woken coughing, eyes heavy-lidded, sick and drowsy and confused. Sam standing statue-still behind his wife, hands clenched about her shoulders. Alisha sitting teary in the far corner, looking away. Gibson sitting by her feet, playing resolutely with his Gameboy; it took a keen eye to see how his hands shook, how his thumbs kept missing the buttons, how his eyes were unfocused and far away. Jade’s best clothes, crumpled in the corner. A pale green gown across his bony chest. Nothing making sense.

Adam standing loyally by his feet, staring into brown eyes, less vacant than they’d been in weeks.

“This isn’t where I was aiming for,” Jade said weakly, when the coughing subsided, as if trying to make a joke. Possessed with horror and grief and panic and love, Adam had backed away; backed up out of the room; turned and fled. Called Tanner from a pay phone sobbing, granite crumbling into dust. Sitting next to his phone at home, shaking, refusing to move, refusing to speak to anyone, not until Dave called, called and said Jade was all right.

And then—then they hadn’t spoken. Not for weeks. Not until last night, when Jade had called at last.

“Did you, uh, get my Christmas card?” Jade had asked nervously. Adam had said nothing. “I—words won’t make right all the ways I hurt you. I know it, Adam. Please… let me see you. Every time I’ve been by, your family says you’re out… but you’re not always out. We both know you’re not always out.”

Adam said nothing.

Jade took a deep breath. “I’ve been working out with my shrink how I should do this… what I should say. He thinks it’s most important that I apologize, and he’s right, but I can’t do that on the phone, not properly, not the way I want to… Please let me see you.”

Adam, still, said nothing.

Jade’s voice climbed higher with feeling. He sounded close to tears. “Adam, please,” he repeated. “I just… I want to see your face again. I want to know that you’ll still look at me after everything I’ve done. I know you miss me… Dave will tell me that much…”

More silence, and Jade’s voice had begun to turn to anger, as it always had when he started to cry. “For god’s sake, Adam, you don’t have to forgive me! You don’t have to speak to me ever again! Just please, god, _please_ —let me see you!”

Adam hung up the phone.

He’d hated himself for it—for every second he was silent. For every breath Jade took, baring his soul, in pain. But he had known that, had he spoke, his voice would have betrayed him—words he wanted desperately not to mean would have come pouring out—he would have forgiven him, and he knew, he _knew_ , he must never do that.

But Tanner had had other plans. Dave had told Adam that Jade had enrolled for classes at UCSF; he hadn’t mentioned to Adam Tanner’s plan to carpool. When Tanner had picked him up that morning for the first day of classes he’d acted normal enough; there had been no indication whatsoever that the next stop would be Jade’s.

Well, Adam couldn’t exactly have gotten out of the car, could he have? And he wasn’t about to yell and scream about the way he’d been tricked. Tanner gave him a meaningful look and he’d mumbled hello. And now—now he’d twisted himself in his seat and was staring hard at Jade. Looking him in the face, in the eye, letting it be known he wasn’t afraid.

Jade could take it no more and cast his eyes down, into his lap. “I was wrong,” he said so quietly he might have been talking to himself. “I thought that if you would just look at me, it would be enough, and I could live with myself… but it’s not. I can’t. I have to tell you.”

Adam flinched from the voice and looked desperately for an escape. Whatever it was, he knew he couldn’t hear it. He was only safe from Jade for as long as he was angry. His life these last two months had begun to make sense again. He was finally starting to heal; the wound that was Smith’s absence did not hurt any less, but he was getting used to it—learning to live in spite of it. And Tanner was really, really great. He was thoughtful and understanding and funny, and knew a lot about film, and _liked_ him—liked being around him—and wasn’t Jade. Adam loved him for that, and hated him for that. But he knew the tenuous balance he’d achieved would be shattered if he heard Jade speak.

And then it was too late.

“I’m sorry for the things I said. I meant them, I think, in a way… I think they were true to me. But I don’t believe them, and I’m sorry I said them, and I’m happy… I’m happy for you, and for him.” Jade gestured at Tanner, eyes still on his lap, speaking more quickly now. “The thing is, Adam, that I’m like you. Or, I think I am. It’s not that I’m attracted to—um—men more than women, or… It’s just you. I’m attracted to _you_ more than anyone. I don’t think… it’s anything… any word or term or classification… but love. This is—god, this is difficult to say—but I love you. And I’m sorry that I do, and I’m even sorrier that I have to say it, and… I’m sorry that I wanted to die…” Jade’s voice broke, sounding like Adam’s whole world was feeling as it shattered, collapsing, caving in. “I felt so alone… as if I alone had a monopoly on grief and no one would ever understand… and I just missed him so much. I wanted to be with him or… or not be at all, and…” Jade sniffed quietly, rubbing his nose unceremoniously with the back of his hand. “And that’s all, I think. It’s selfish, but I wanted you to know.”

With either the worst timing, or the best, the universe had ever contrived, they arrived at campus. Tanner parked in the first parking spot that was open and Jade dived out of the car, almost before it had stopped moving.

Adam and Tanner sat in silence, listening to the engine click. Adam wondered why Tanner, too, hadn’t abandoned ship. He needed to think, and scream, and hit things, and cry… and he needed to be alone.

“Adam,” Tanner said quietly, and Adam had to struggle very earnestly not to punch him in the head. Couldn’t he tell something important had just happened? Didn’t he feel the tremors of Adam’s world falling apart?

“I think we should talk,” Tanner coaxed.

“I do _not_ want to talk right now,” Adam said automatically. His mouth tasted like pennies. Why did it taste like pennies?

“Then listen,” said Tanner; Adam realized he wasn’t getting out of this one. “I like you, Adam, a lot. But this—well, it’s just ridiculous, isn’t it? I would love it—I mean that, _love_ it—if we could be friends. But I just don’t think that you and me is right for right now.”

A wave of nausea slammed into Adam’s gut. “Is this because of what Jade said?” he asked, voice shot through with dread.

Tanner laughed gently. “You know, I’ve never liked him,” he said. “And I’ve tried. But you—you used to love him.” Tanner’s voice got quiet. “I know that. And it’s stupid to try to cut him out of your life, when you obviously care so much about him. But… for all that… no. This isn’t about him. I think that… romantically… you and I are just not right for each other.” Tanner paused before prompting, “Adam? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Adam understood the words. He even understood their meanings. But he couldn’t for the life of him work out what it meant for him now.

“Why are you doing this? Why now, why today?” Adam heard a voice that sounded a lot like his own asking.

“Because we’re not as happy as we could be,” Tanner said with some difficulty, trying very hard to say it right. “I—no, I’m not unhappy, but—I don’t love you, Adam. And don’t bother protesting, because I know you don’t love me—and I don’t want you to. That’s not what I’m saying. I want to be your friend, okay? I think we can still be good for each other. Even while pursuing… better things.” Tanner winced. “That came out wrong,” he muttered, but wasn’t able to find the words to correct it.

“Is there someone else?” Adam asked, finding it difficult to speak, let alone think.

“For me? No,” Tanner said, looking surprised that Adam was asking. “But there will be—for both of us—someday. So… no hard feelings? We’ll be cool, yeah?”

Adam, somewhat shell-shocked, blinked at Tanner. “Us? Oh, yeah, I mean… sure. I—we—it’ll be okay. I’m not… I’m not mad.”

Tanner looked relieved, and glanced at his watch. “Well… let’s head in, shall we? I don’t want to be late to Ethics.”

Adam nodded, feeling emptier than usual. “Oh, yeah, right. I’ll… I’ll just be a minute. You go ahead.”

Tanner put a hand on Adam’s shoulder and asked if he was all right one final time. Adam nodded vigorously, eyes not quite focused, and sat in silent stillness for a long time after Tanner left. Thinking.

 

 

 

This wasn’t so terrible, Jade thought as his new sociology professor’s voice washed over him, reciting the syllabus. It was no Berkeley—but maybe that wasn’t the worst thing. This is where Smith would have been sitting, come next fall. Anywhere his brother would have been couldn’t be too bad a place to be, Jade reasoned. Besides which—it felt good, really it did, to be back in classes. Enrolling—buying textbooks and fresh notebooks—it felt, in a way, like a second chance to be normal. He couldn’t exactly start the year over, but he could go to classes and study for tests and stay up too late and get up too early like everyone else his age—like he hadn’t lost a brother, lost himself.

Of course, that wasn’t it, not exactly. Because he was still the person those things had happened to—who had made some of those things happen. He didn’t want to forget that. He wasn’t going to dive in and tear the wounds open whenever they showed signs of healing—if ever they did—but he didn’t want to stop feeling it, didn’t want to forget, who he was and who he’d been, the things he’d seen, the things he’d done.

He knew he should be reeling from the shock of what he’d said to Adam not an hour ago. Knew he should be checking himself for signs of insanity, and reality for holes. But he wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t even terribly worried about what was coming next. The important part, the part that had been such a long time coming, had happened. Now it was only a matter of things falling into place—the pieces fall as they may.

The holistic attitude of the moment painted perhaps too peaceful a picture of him. He wasn’t as calm as all that. As soon as his first class ended, he was meeting Hunter for coffee in the student lounge so they could hash over what he’d said and those few facial tics of Adam’s that might be revealing as to what he felt.

Jade had been seeing a lot of Hunter lately; he was the one who’d convinced Jade to enroll in classes in the first place. Except for a few complaints about his splintered friends and their blond sidekicks, Dave had approved of Hunter too.

Jade thought back to the first real conversation he’d had with Hunter, who was quickly filling the best-friend vacancy Adam had left behind. For all that Dave had been the logical choice, his time was already split with Adam and work; besides that, Hunter understood what it was _like_ in a way he wasn’t sure even Dave was able to.

After the first 24 hours of state-mandated institutionalization, Jade had been allowed to make a phone call. It was Hunter’s number he’d chosen.

“It’s me,” he’d said, as soon as Hunter had picked up. “I wanted to take you up on your offer.”

“What offer?” Hunter had asked warily.

“Help,” Jade said, as humble as he was able to be.

“If this is about—” Hunter had begun sharply.

“It’s not about drugs,” Jade said. “I’ve taken… enough of those. Damn near too many. I was thinking that we could… be friends.”

“My mother did that, you know,” Hunter said candidly, sounding strange even for him, not even bothering with the usual preliminary screening for pod impersonators. “Took enough pills. More than, really. She cut all the phone cords in the house, and took everything she could swallow. …I found her,” he went on after a difficult pause. Jade swallowed too loudly. “Her lips were turning blue, like yours must have… She told me she’d done something bad. Taken… taken a lot of… Told me to run for help—to run and get help, or else she’d die. And I… I couldn’t run fast enough…” Hunter’s voice faded into nothing. Jade could hear only shuddery breathing over the line.

“Why do you sell them, then?” Jade asked abruptly, not knowing how to react to the grief of strangers, not yet knowing how to react to his own. He had struggled for words. “Why did you give me… Why do you sell…”

“I don’t,” Hunter laughed, but it was a choked, unhappy sound. “Do you still think that I do that? I never… I never did. I didn’t know how else… how else to make you keep talking to me. To make you like me. And I… I thought it might help you… not to feel it.”

“But I’m meant to feel it,” Jade said matter-of-factly, because he wasn’t hiding from that anymore.

“Yes,” Hunter had said vigorously, sounding grateful that Jade understood. “Yes, you are. We all are. We’re meant to feel it.”

“Why don’t we, then?” Jade had asked. He’d felt so strange—clean, honest, brave. In the aftermath of his weakest moment, he felt _strong_. “Why don’t we feel it? Together. You can help me, and I can help you. That way… neither of us will have to feel so… alone.”

Hunter’s laughter had been more relieved then, happier. “Yeah, all right,” he’d agreed quietly. “Okay. We can try.”

Jade remembered that conversation fondly for all that it had been a painful one. With it he had found a way to be less alone—to stop making himself so alone. The doctors had helped with that, too—fixing him a prescription of his own, not to block out the world, but to make it clearer, easier to focus on, easier for him to live in.

When class was dismissed, Jade had to check and recheck the oppressive face of the clock on the wall. He’d never known an hour and a half to pass so quickly. He realized with a jolt that he was nervous—the elated, fuzzy warm sort of nervous; he was excited, not just to see Hunter, but to see everything that would follow. He was truly looking forward to something for the first time since his brother had died. And that… that was a good thing.

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	13. 3 Months & 4 Days After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own the boys, and this never happened, but that doesn't mean we can't keep warm at night pretending that it did.
> 
> I highly recommend Electric Light Orchestra's "Do Ya" as accompaniment to this chapter.

3 MONTHS & 4 DAYS AFTER

 

Adam continued to pace. He’d been doing it all morning, and it had occupied most of his free time during the week as well. It was only a matter of time before he wore through the floor.

But he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t concentrate on his classes or his homework; he couldn’t sleep; he barely had the attention span to make it through a commercial, let alone a movie. He couldn’t do anything, really, without all the things Jade, and then Tanner, (who he’d thought he’d been doing rather well with) had said echoing through his head.

After four days of this, it was hard to believe they hadn’t been mocking him. Hard to believe that it hadn’t, after all, been some elaborate ploy—maybe something they’d planned together—to rend his world apart.

And he didn’t know what to do.

Then the doorbell rang, and decided for him.

 

 

Dave stalked into Adam’s room, flung open the blinds, and whirled to face his friend glaring, arms crossed tightly over his chest.

“You,” he said by way of greeting, “are a piece of shit.”

“Oh, hi, nice to see you too—” Adam started in aggressively, eager to relieve stress.

But Dave wasn’t interested. He just raised his voice to speak over Adam. “Jade pours his _heart_ out to you after you’ve been a total ass to him for _months_ —after I’ve listened to you wax on about him for YEARS—and you what—just don’t care anymore? Can’t even be bothered to fucking _talk_ to him about it?”

Adam watched Dave expressionlessly, which only made his friend angrier. In truth, Dave wasn’t sure why, exactly, he was so angry about this; maybe it was the toll of the long silence between his two closest friends and his ongoing attempts to mediate it. Maybe it was spending all of high school dealing with lovesick Adam’s puppy dog eyes to have it come down to this. Maybe it was that Pugets were dropping like flies and he was really just a kid—wasn’t prepared to, didn’t know _how_ to, keep on coping with the sadness and the strain.

“Go ahead,” Dave said aggressively, “defend yourself. Try it. Go on.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Adam said simply. Dave wasn’t sure what he’d been hoping for, but this defeat, this honesty, wasn’t it.

“How can you not know what to do?” Dave enunciated clearly, as if he were talking to an idiot, or his dear friend Adam. “Everything you’ve ever wanted has just fallen into your undeserving lap—”

“I didn’t want any of this,” Adam said hollowly, and Dave stopped. He hadn’t thought of that. “I didn’t want Smith to die, or Jade to try to, or Tanner to dump me, or to spend a year and a half watching my best friend pull himself further and further away from me. I certainly didn’t want Jade to ambush me in Tanner’s car with some misguided declaration of shit that isn’t true, and doesn’t last, for anyone—”

“So that’s what this is,” Dave interrupted quietly. His voice was so quiet, in fact, that it wouldn’t have been sufficient to stop anyone’s rant—unless they had very much wanted to be stopped before they could say the words out loud, make them true. “You’ve given up on love? Well, isn’t _that_ fucking original. Isn’t that conv—”

Adam took a deep breath. “No, Dave, it _isn’t_ convenient,” he said, voice shaking. “I—how many years did I pine over him? How many years did I love him, untarnished, uninterrupted, with all of myself? And how happy did that make me?” He paused, seeming to concentrate very hard on each breath.

“It didn’t,” Dave said, feeling quite small.

“It didn’t, right,” Adam agreed, voice growing stronger. “And it didn’t seem to make him happy either, did it? You saw—we all saw—I mean, everyone knew… he was pulling away, wasn’t he? Burying himself. Never visiting home… never spending time with me when he did… Like he couldn’t stand to be around me anymore.”

“That’s not how it… I mean, I’m sure…” Dave protested weakly.

“And then there was Tanner,” Adam pressed on, sounding almost confident now, for all that he was resigned to the truth of what he was saying. “There was Tanner, who I _didn’t_ love, who was a nice guy but I didn’t love, wasn’t Jade, and… and look at how happy we were. Maybe it didn’t last very long, but how stable am I right now? How emotionally able am I to have a lasting relationship at this point? And Tanner and me, we were happy. We had a lot of fun. And there wasn’t any love.” Adam stopped, took stock of what he had said so far, and concluded, “So what has love done? Made me miserable, lost me my best friend. It seems to me… like that whole business… is more trouble than it’s worth. …Am I wrong?”

Dave chewed his lip. It was a compelling argument. Solid, concise, proof in abundance. Hard to refute. And really, it wasn’t his fight. Wasn’t his place to convince or persuade anyone. But they had all lost so much in the last few months. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a good thing, good for everyone, would start to heal all of them.

“No,” he said at last. “You’re not wrong. You might even be right. But think about it, Ads. Won’t you hate yourself forever if you let him go? Wouldn’t you rather… try?”

“This isn’t a romantic comedy,” Adam said seriously. “I’m not the person I was. I don’t feel what I used to. It’s not going to be perfect; it’s not going to be happily ever after. I appreciate you trying, but it’s not going to work.”

Dave nodded his head, looking at his hands. “That’s fair,” he said quietly, and meant it. But it still didn’t feel right.

 

 

Adam thought about film. Particularly, he thought about endings. The best movies, he and Tanner had agreed, were the ones that didn’t end. The ones where the hero _didn’t_ save the day, the guy _didn’t_ get the girl, the dog _didn’t_ live, and no one stopped the suicide or disarmed the bomb in the final seconds. There weren’t many American films that did that. If there was every any real potential for an awful, jarring, loose-end melancholy finish, American filmmakers generally sent in Bruce Willis who, after getting shot in the chest at least once, managed to save the world and the president, woo the sexy younger woman, and get home in time for the fireworks with something wry and macho to say. Most of them, though, didn’t even have the potential; most of them were cheesy music, happily ever after, roll credits.

Adam preferred a movie with depth; a movie that didn’t so much _end_ as cut to the gruesome montage of the zombie apocalypse, rotting flesh and bloody teeth, and then faded to black, leaving you with a pounding heart, dry mouth, and nightmares. At the very least, he expected the main character to die gruesomely and unexpectedly.

Inarguably, that was the best sort of film. Anything else fell short—especially if it had a laugh track. But—and Adam truly had to consider this—was that necessarily the best sort of _life_? Heartbreak, Götterdammerung, the fiery chasms of hell—well. It made for excellent cinematic effect, but was that really how he wanted to go? Armed with a pocket knife, ravenous zombie horde bearing down on him, fade to black?

Or did he want the cheesy Hollywood ending? No matter how much scorn he might have for campy, sappy, John Hughes endings, who didn’t want one of their own?

Thinking about it like that made it easy. He stopped pacing. Instead, he flew through the house, rifling through stacks of tapes till he found the right one, and took off for his car.

 

 

Jade was in Smith’s room, cleaning, an odd mix of cheerfully determined and sadly reminiscent. He had realized last night, when his father asked to see Smith’s room, that it couldn’t stay just as he’d left it forever. He’d thought about it: Sam shouldn’t be the one to clean it; not because he loved Smith less, not because it was less important to him, but because he was busy with his living children, trying to fight grief and keep the family afloat and hold down a job all at once. And Sam hadn’t been there from the start. Sam didn’t remember Smith in diapers, wasn’t there when they had fingerpainted the kitchen floor, hadn’t known him as long or as well as Jade had. And for once, Jade did not hold that against him. The next logical candidate was Ellie, but she shouldn’t be the one to restore order to the last chaos of Smith either. Jade knew his mother was still not coping with her grief. She was drowning in it. She’d been to a plethora of shrinks and done trials of such a wide range of medication that even Hunter would’ve been impressed. With an uncomfortable squirm of guilt, Jade also knew his own tumultuous experiences with grieving had not been overly helpful to her. Ellie, he knew, would not be able to do what needed to be done. She couldn’t even cross the threshold; he’d come across her dozens of times, silent and crying as she stood in the doorway, lost in the suspended animation of Smith’s last days, looking every day less and less like he would ever return to it.

So Jade had taken it upon himself, and gladly. He didn’t mind—his brother had had a lot of cool stuff, and an archaeology dig through Smith’s national disaster of a living space was the closest he’d be getting to hanging out with his brother again for a long time. He was tackling the room slowly, doing a small part from each day, both to make it last and keep himself from being overwhelmed with the emotion. For all that it was painful, it was rewarding; he liked holding Smith’s things, trying to capture Smith’s thoughts, feeling close to his brother again.

His eyes were not entirely dry as he shifted through the great sheaves of discarded paper on Smith’s desk. But he was smiling.

He glanced away from the abandoned essay, something for an old English class, he’d been skimming, looking out the window curiously. Someone’s music was turned up very loud—there was no yet any evidence of a car, but he could hear the strains of its stereo nonetheless. Whoever it was, they had a very impressive set of speakers. As the music grew clearer, he strained to pick out what was playing.

He recognized the song a few seconds before the car it was emanating from came into view. _Do ya, do ya want my love_ : Electric Light Orchestra, if he wasn’t mistaken. He hadn’t heard the song in ages. Jade was aware of his smile at the song choice—because wasn’t that what he had said to Adam, made simple, in less words?

At first he thought that it was only because he was thinking of Adam that the battered white Suburban looked like the very one Adam drove. But as the music grew louder and the car careened closer, Jade realized with a jolt that it _was_ Adam, could only be Adam, had always been Adam—

Jade was rocketing down the stairs as recklessly as was usually Adam’s wont. The velocity carried him skidding out the front door and onto the porch steps just as Adam screeched to a halt in his driveway, windows rolled down and stereo deafening. _Well I think you know what I’m tryin’ to say, woman; that is, I’d like to save you for a rainy day_.

Adam jumped out of the car, leaving it running, and walked with easy confidence toward Jade. He was smiling, hands spread, belting, “They come a-runnin’ just to get a look, just to feel, just to touch her long black hair; they don’t give a damn. But Iiiiiii never seen nothing like you!”

Jade laughed in spite of himself, in spite of everything—in spite of Smith, of Tanner, of months of silence, of his ill-advised confession. It was hilarious, the most wonderful thing he’d seen in weeks, and so he laughed as Adam sang, “Do ya, do ya want my love? Do ya, do ya want my face? Do ya, do ya want my mind? Do ya—”

“What _is_ this?” Jade sputtered, laughing, interrupting, grinning, not caring, hilarity demolishing history.

Adam paused in singing, eyes sincere and blue and locked with Jade’s own.

“This is me,” he said, grinning and a little breathless from singing, “asking you—” and he sang, out of sync with the music, in one glorious burst, “do ya, do ya want my love?” This just made Jade laugh harder, and Adam kept smiling, stepping closer. “This,” he said, “is a movie ending. This,” and he took a step closer to Jade, closing that last distance, “is happily ever after.””

He cupped Jade’s chin, still laughing, in the palm of his hand and brought those smiling lips to meet his own.

And he was right, Jade thought, in that last dizzy moment he still had the capacity for thought. It was exactly like a movie ending.

 

End Notes:

We're almost done... Let me know what you think!

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


	14. After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own the boys. This never happened.

_Smith,  
_

_There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Do you remember that big fight we had? Maybe a week or something before you died. You called me at school. You wanted me to come home. You told me you knew what I was doing, and it wasn’t fair to Adam, and I was a stupid ass hat if I thought it would make anyone happy. And I told you that you didn’t know shit about me and that you should stay out of my life._

_You remember. Clearly, you won the conversation; and I only say that because I_ did _come home, didn’t I? I came home and to celebrate we all went out on the stupid fucking boat, and that night we were all four of us going to hang out together, and we were going to watch some stupid fucking movie about serial killers, your favorite, and… and I am seriously off topic here. We both know you died that day. I’m really not trying to beat that point into the ground or anything. What I’m trying to say is, you were right. You did know shit about me. In fact, brother, you had me down fucking pat.  
_

_When you told me that I might be surprised if I just tried—if I wasn’t so proud, so afraid.  
_

_I’ve tried a lot of things since you’ve been gone. Drugs, for example. Also being honest with people, at least sometimes; and thinking about them at least half as much as I think about me. I mean, there’s Hunter, to whom I would like to say don’t think for a second I don’t know you’re reading over my shoulder, you degenerate lowlife. If I wasn’t such an extremely considerate and empathetic and patient person—fuck you, Hunter, it’s the goddamn truth—there’d be no way in hell I’d be able to put up with this ass hat. I’ve tried being empty and lost and alone, no matter how many people are around me. I’ve even tried dying.  
_

_What I want to say is, I think I understand you a lot better now that I did before. I think I understand a lot of things now that I never would have, if you had stayed alive like little brothers are supposed to.  
_

_The biggest thing you were right about—and god, if I could see your face right now, I know exactly what it would look like, you smarmy bastard—was taking chances. In particular, taking chances pertaining to and/or involving our mutual friend Adam._  
Maybe this is a dorky cliché, Smith—again, Hunter, fuck yourself—this last letter full of self-reflection and closure and regret and sappy Hallmark-isms, but I have to say it:  
I never thought I could be this happy.  


_When you died, I figured that was it. Game over. Thus the subsequent drug abuse and suicide attempt. I figured that I could never be happy again—and who would want to be, in a world capable of so much pain.  
_

_I can imagine the look on your face, if I had turned up in the afterlife as planned (and tell me, brother, what’s it like? Does it exist? Is it beautiful? Lame, probably, if you’re there.) You would have fucking_ murdered _me, I know it. “Jade,” you would have said in that pained you-must-be-mentally-retarded way of yours, “you missed the whole fucking point.”_

_Because here’s the fucking point, Smith, the one I should have gotten all along:_   
_If you’re dead, I need to be—have to be, for both our sakes—living._

_I forgive you for dying. I’ve almost forgiven me for living. And that’s a hell of a thing, Smith. Forgiveness is a hell of a thing._

_So that’s it, isn’t it? There’s nothing left to say. I’m not going to close our dialogue officially—especially after the way that panned out last time—because you’ll be here, waiting, when I need you._

_But right now, I don’t need you._

_~~I love you, brother.~~ _

_Here’s to never forgetting._

_I don’t think this is the last time you’ll hear from me, but I should say it anyway, because I’m ready now. Goodbye, for now._

_See you on the other side, little brother, if there is one._

_Love, Jade_

 

 

AFTER

 

Hunter snorted, looking over his friend’s shoulder. “It figures that you’re gay,” he snickered, scanning some choice lines. “I mean there’s no other explanation for you writing this shit. Are they all this lame?”

Jade scowled good-naturedly. “They’re not _lame_ ,” he defended himself. “Daniel thinks they’re cathartic.”

Hunter propped himself up on one elbow, rifling through the envelope of letters. “Is that supposed to make you sound _less_ queer? Because well done, my friend, well done. I now realize you’re the world’s most masculine man.”

As Hunter began to sing _Lola_ horribly off-key, Jade made a grab for the envelope. Perhaps due to the notorious slowness of the undead, Hunter was quicker. He tapped the it on his friend’s head, waving it just out of reach of Jade’s swatting hands. “Seriously, I wouldn’t be caught dead with a letter like this. It could be brutally devastating to my image.”

Grappling for the parcel, Jade grunted, “Ah, yes, your hallowed _image_ —funny how I’m, hmm, what’s the phrase? The only fucking person in the universe who even _has_ one of your business cards?”

“Sir, you wound me!” Hunter shouted, clutching his heart and staggering back.

“Ladies!” Dave interrupted the squabbling pair, deftly snatching the envelope from Hunter’s hands and stowing it safely on an end table he could guard. “Can we quiet down, please? The show’s about to start.” Dave paused as Adam entered the room armed with an economy-sized bowl of popcorn. “Why are we watching this again?” he asked as Adam settled himself comfortably in Jade’s personal space.

“Because it’s John Hughes!” Hunter took it upon himself to announce, descending upon the popcorn bowl like a zombie upon a brain buffet and smiling at his own deftness of simile. “Hughes films are instant classics. Everyone knows this.”

“Yeah, but _Sixteen Candles_? Adam hasn’t shut up about the whole ‘cheesy, Americanized happy ending genre’ since he saw his first fucking Disney movie. I can’t remember the last time we were allowed to watch a movie that didn’t end in the total cataclysmic annihilation of the world.”

Adam smiled contentedly, exchanging a sickeningly significant look with Jade, whose arm was snug around his waist. “Maybe I’m ready for some things to end well,” he said in a way he thought was cryptic and world-wise but elicited much eye-rolling and gagging from Hunter and Dave.

But it was true. This time, they all deserved a happy ending.

 

End Notes:

And I mean that, guys. Every now and then, we all do.

 

Thank you for taking this journey with me. If you want to let me know what you've thought and felt along the way, I'd love to listen.

Yours,  
Kaylie

 

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=7883>


End file.
